Smart Girl Dumb Questions: Casey Dreier answers why space is worth it

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Smart Girl Dumb Questions interviews our Chief of Space Policy this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. This week, while the Planetary Radio team takes a little time off for US Thanksgiving, we're excited to share something special from our friends over at the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast. Their host, Nayeema Raza, sits down with Casey Dreier, our Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society for fun and surprisingly deep conversation about a question that we hear all the time in the space community, do we really need to go to space? And is NASA worth $25 billion a year?

Their discussion ranges from the Drake equation and GPS to NASA budget battles and the spin-off technologies that most people don't realize were born of space exploration. It's a fascinating conversation and a great resource if you've ever had a hard time explaining to friends and family why space exploration matters so much. And stick around for after the interview. Since it's the United States' Thanksgiving week, What's Up? with Bruce Betts, our Chief Scientist, is a special holiday edition. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and are placed within it.

Before we jump in, here's a little bit of context. This conversation comes from our friends over at Smart Girl Dumb Questions, a podcast hosted by journalist Nayeema Raza, where she asks seemingly dumb questions to experts to get clear answers on complex topics. Space isn't her usual topic, which makes her conversation with Casey especially fun. She brings fresh curiosity and isn't afraid to ask the questions that people genuinely wonder about. Questions like, why does space matter? Why does it cost so much and how do we balance human exploration with the amazing science that all of our robotic missions deliver? Nayeema also recorded an episode with Planetary Society CEO, Bill Nye, which you can find on the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast, along with episodes featuring guests like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mark Cuban and Cleo Abram. Her new episodes come out every Tuesday. Here's Nayeema's conversation with Casey.

Casey Dreier: Have you ever seen a rocket launch before?

Nayeema Raza: Only on my little screen on my phone, never in real life.

Casey Dreier: A rocket launch in person is a profound experience because you feel it, you don't just watch it. And you realize that the screen gives you a certain distance from what is at its core, something that's hard to process, which is like something the size of a skyscraper lifting off in front of you. And it almost you over with its sound and you feel it reverberating in your chest and then all the thousands of people around you are reacting to it. I remember thinking after I saw that, "All of these people, thousands of people worked for 10 years to build this thing on top of what amounts to a giant bomb and shoot it off into just this red point in the sky, purely for the curiosity of what's on that red dot." And something was so moving about that to me. I was like, "I need to do everything I can to keep this."

Nayeema Raza: Yeah. I'm Nayeema Raza, this is Smart Girl Dumb Questions. And do we need to go to space, is my question today. It's one that I'm going to ask to my guest, Casey Dreier. Hi Casey, how are you?

Casey Dreier: I'm doing great.

Nayeema Raza: Casey is the Chief of Space Policy for The Planetary Society, an organization that's helmed by Bill Nye. Casey is also a huge history and science geek. Can I say that?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, that's appropriate.

Nayeema Raza: I think your shirt is saying that.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it's not too hard to figure out.

Nayeema Raza: Casey's shirt right now has astronauts and NASA and NASA logos spinning around.

Casey Dreier: And I have the Drake equation.

Nayeema Raza: Oh my gosh, what's that?

Casey Dreier: It's a way to kind of estimate how many intelligent civilizations may exist in the galaxy.

Nayeema Raza: What's the answer?

Casey Dreier: More than zero.

Nayeema Raza: Oh, okay. I sometimes worry it's zero, including ourselves.

Casey Dreier: True, intelligent. Yeah, they actually get around that by saying capable of communication using radio waves.

Nayeema Raza: Oh, we definitely qualify for that.

Casey Dreier: So that one, there's a one in our galaxy. So is there two, I guess is the big question.

Nayeema Raza: Okay, I want to know the answer to that.

Casey Dreier: That's what everyone does, right?

Nayeema Raza: Chief of Space Policy, do you think there are other Chief of Space Policies in other... Do you ever think about that? "Oh, there's someone in other planets and galaxies."

Casey Dreier: I do often think about when you look up towards one of the stars that has an exoplanet, if you're kind of inadvertently collecting a few photons from the person looking back at you. But I've never thought about their professional career, but someone would have to. But that does assume that they collectively work together in ways that require a policy, versus some other way of making coordinated decisions among a large society, if you can call them. That starts to get pretty weird when you assert complete unknown of other life.

Speaker: Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

Nayeema Raza: One of the reasons I call you a geek is because the first time we spoke on the phone, which was just a couple of weeks ago, you dug up an old paper by a former chief historian at NASA, Roger Lanius?

Casey Dreier: Lanius.

Nayeema Raza: Lanius.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: And I want to read a bit of it so people kind of understand it. We spoke on the phone and you said, "Oh, I have this great paper I'm going to send to you," and indeed you did. And it starts with, "What if we viewed the history of human space flight somewhat less through the lens of Cold War politics, which admittedly was central to the race to the moon, but more as an expression of what might be called a religion of space flight?" How do you read that now? That was written in 2013, so a year into Obama administration.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: Do you think that we're still connected in this religious, spiritual quest to know what's out there?

Casey Dreier: I think we're more so. I love that paper, it's a great way to kind of map on an interpretation of why we do particularly human spaceflight, why it kind of occupies this kind of hallowed area within our politics. And I'd say that's only really increased in the last few years in this administration, but even with people like Elon Musk, who within that framework would be a prophet. And what its point is is that when you think about spaceflight, it touches on something that is not just purely in the rational mind.

And that's a unique place for a public policy issue to exist in because it makes you feel something. And then as a consequence, it can be symbolically used for something. And so what we do or don't do in space isn't just an issue of numbers and technology and budgets. It's an issue of, it says something about us as a species or as a nation. And that makes it special and this is a way to try to examine why is there such a strong, at least among certain people, commitment towards it? So I love that way of looking at it. And the phrase you use I think, is civil religion.

Nayeema Raza: Civil religion.

Casey Dreier: So it's like no one's praying to astronauts, but you can have-

Nayeema Raza: Some people probably are.

Casey Dreier: Some people, but people do treat them with reverence, right?

Nayeema Raza: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: If an astronaut sits down next to you and you don't know who they are, most people don't know who their astronauts are these days, but then they say, "Oh, I've been into space on the space station." Most people start to treat them differently. You would meet one of the people who walked on the moon, you want to shake their hands because then you've shaken the hands with someone who walked on the moon, right?

Nayeema Raza: It's like you've been there, transitive property.

Casey Dreier: There is some weird, which is completely irrational, but I've done it. And that's like I want to shake the hands of someone who's been on the moon. And so space occupies some symbolic role still, whether we are conscious of it or not. And I think it's because it's just how we evolved. Literally, it was the heavens for the longest time, and now we get to go into the heavens and so there's something special about that.

Nayeema Raza: Right. How did you, Casey Dreier, come into this religion, the civil religion? You weren't born into it, presumably.

Casey Dreier: I was not. Yeah, my experience is the equivalent of a conversion in a sense, because I went and saw a rocket launch. And rocket launches are a very powerful thing. And so-

Nayeema Raza: When was that?

Casey Dreier: That was 2011, it launched the Curiosity Rover. So I mean, I like space as a kid, but a lot of kids do. But that was I think what made me want to actually do something on a practical level about this because it doesn't just happen. We decide to do this or not, and I really recommend everyone should just go and experience that once because it is really powerful.

Nayeema Raza: It's funny, my godson Jack, who is a young, young kid in elementary school, he sent me this question for you. Hang on, I want to pull it up.

Jack: I want to know how rockets work.

Nayeema Raza: How do rockets work?

Casey Dreier: Fair enough.

Nayeema Raza: That's what's going through my mind as you're telling this story. I'm like, "It is amazing that thousands of people or 1,000 people worked on getting that up, but how did they do it, what did they make?"

Casey Dreier: Rocket is basically mixing two propellants, an oxidizer and some fuel source, and it's controlling an explosion. So it's taking what would just normally explode into a giant fireball, and slowing it down and then pointing it in one direction. And then you have Newton's third law, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. You're just basically pushing all that stuff out, that shoots your rocket up. At the very basic level, that's how a rocket works.

Nayeema Raza: That's how a rocket works.

Casey Dreier: Interesting, The New York Times claimed that rockets would not work in space in the 1920s, and said that this is a whole thing about going into space as a pure fantasy, it'll never work.

Nayeema Raza: Really?

Casey Dreier: I think they formally retracted-

Nayeema Raza: Was it the editorial board?

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: Oh, it's funny. When I worked in New York Times opinion, sometimes we would be looking back at editorial board opinions from past, being like, "Oh, well." It's a famous thing we like to study.

Casey Dreier: But I mean, it's definitionally non-intuitive. Rockets have only existed conceptually for about 130 years.

Nayeema Raza: I think so much of how we talk about science and space right now has become political, has become partisan. As your colleague, Bill Nye corrected me, it's about the partisanship of it that's more challenging than the politics of it because you have to make resource decisions, and that's policy and politics. But it's the division of it that's sad because it feels like a universal quest.

Casey Dreier: Right.

Nayeema Raza: I want to have a conversation with you that is as nonpartisan as possible, which I think is very possible because-

Casey Dreier: Absolutely.

Nayeema Raza: In our conversations to date, I've seen you kind of laud various actions-

Casey Dreier: It's not inherently partisan. There's no democratic platform for space or republican platform for space. There's nothing inherently that would drive one party to believe in one thing about the other.

Nayeema Raza: It's not like Republicans are better at space or Democrats are better at space.

Casey Dreier: Right. I mean, John F. Kennedy sent us to the moon and the essence of it is that it used to be, and still broadly is, a unifying endeavor because of this and I think because of this civil religion aspect to it. Nixon flirted with ending human space flight altogether after Apollo, but ultimately he couldn't bring himself to do it even though he wanted to cut the budget, because he saw astronauts as being heroes for that same reason. They're these kind of holy caste. And to walk away from that would be to diminish something about the nation. So the symbolism always is applied to this thing.

It doesn't just say something about NASA, it says something about the country, if we stop going into space, is how Nixon saw it. And so politically, yes, anytime you have more than two people in a room, it's politics. But partisanship is still generally free of that. You can put earth science off to the side on that one, but everything else is generally broad. But I think what's been happening is that it's been who's been talking about it and how they've been talking about it is starting to infect and to kind of code certain aspects over others as partisan or not.

Nayeema Raza: Before we get to how they've been talking about it and who's been talking about it, let's talk about how it was in this very romantic imagination or romantic recollection of the Apollo times, because I think that is this moment. And it was in the paper you sent me, talked about the astronauts and apostles. I mean, it was a very kind of religious spiritual journey, these missions. Can you take us back? I know you weren't around then. You're a young person. For anyone listening, Casey's a young person.

Casey Dreier: Slightly younger than that, yeah.

Nayeema Raza: But he wrote in that paper, "Apollo evoked in a metaphorical and absolutist sense, emotions of awe, devotion, omnipotence, and most importantly, redemption for humanity."

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah. Nothing, Tuesday, really low stakes. How did they do all of that amazing stuff?

Casey Dreier: It was so new. And I mean, space had just happened. The first satellite had only gone up 10 years before.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, give us time and space and give us the whole setting.

Casey Dreier: Sure. The first satellite was Sputnik in 1957, completely changed the United States' idea of itself and what they thought of the Soviet Union. It breached the heavens for the first time. Again, these are powerful symbols. So within 12 years, you went from the US not being able to launch something the size of a grapefruit into space without a rocket exploding, into landing two people on the surface of the moon and bringing them back safely. 12 years, that's not a lot of time. And so basically, that was seen as this peak of techno-optimism.

Whatever we decide to do, we have the engineering, organization and capabilities to just figure out and do it. And that was seen as, again, this broader symbol of, "Oh, well, what else? We must be able to do literally anything else." And obviously, we can't. And we've been humbled, I think, since that. But these certain types of engineering challenges, I think opened up for the first time. Every single Apollo astronaut was born in the 1930s. They're born in places, in farmhouses and places that didn't have running water and-

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, it's the Great Depression era and families.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, and by the time they're not even middle-aged, they're walking on the moon. So it is kind of this apotheosis of this mid-twentieth century technological capability leap. But then there was this larger context around it. Movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey came out two years before the landing of Apollo. What's that movie about? And just for, I guess spoilers for who hasn't seen a 50 year-old movie. But at the essence, it's about transcendence, right? I mean, that movie is such an overtly religious type of thing. It's like a salvation. Space, by going into space, humanity will turn into something else.

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: It will mediate this transition into a higher level of existence. Kubrick said, "I'm going to make a movie about the evolution of Ape to Angel." And so Apollo was seen as here's the inevitable process for this. And so Apollo was seen by a lot as, that's your first step. So of course, we're going to be on Mars. We'll have this and that and this within years, and none of that happened.

Nayeema Raza: Why didn't more happen afterwards? It seems like there was a generation of kids who grew up thinking, "Oh my gosh," just like this generation that you're describing went from Great Depression era family to walking on the moon. "We are going to know within our lifetime, about life and other planets and other." What can't we do? What is there? Is there other life on the cosmos? Is there more potential? Why hasn't there been more learning in this time?

Casey Dreier: Well, everyone hates Richard Nixon, so we can blame Richard Nixon, but it's indicative of something-

Nayeema Raza: There's probably some Richard Nixon stands out there. I don't know if my audience is full of Richard Nixon stands, but maybe. Maybe someone's wearing his T-shirt and haircut.

Casey Dreier: I mean, I think what changed was that because it was pitched as a race, we won the race, great. The political dynamics of the Cold War that spurred it in the early 1960s had calmed down a lot. And then clearly, something changed in the '70s. All of these other indicators about economic growth and productivity and wages, all these things start to trend downwards in the '70s. Same with going into space, that we pulled back from that as a nation. We wanted to spend less money and that was an easy way to spend less money. I mean, we're not talking about huge amounts. NASA at the time was getting maybe two times what it has now.

Which is not nothing, but as compared to the schema, they were spending the equivalent of Apollo every year in Vietnam. That may have also been part of it too, they're spending a lot of money in Vietnam as well. And so just all of these kinds of things, there is a big shift in policy. Basically what happened, Nixon's White House said, "You know what, NASA? You're no longer special. You will be part of the annual process to give money. You'll compete and elbow your way for resources like any other federal agency. You are no longer deemed this priority thing."

Nayeema Raza: Because we won the race, and so now we can just rest on our laurels a little bit.

Casey Dreier: And it wasn't just him. Public opinion, interestingly, we tend to look back to Apollo as you just kind of framed it, with this romantic ideal that, "Oh, of course everyone is into it." In reality, the majority of the public was never that supportive of Apollo.

Nayeema Raza: Really?

Casey Dreier: When there's public polling done in the era, saying, "Is Apollo worth it or not?" And the only time it was ever above 50% was right after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Nayeema Raza: That is so interesting, because when I was reading that historian note from Roger Lanius, he does say, "Despite less than full support for space exploration," and I was curious what that meant. It was literally an unpopular idea.

Casey Dreier: It was. And the amount of people who said we're spending too much on space had been trending up.

Nayeema Raza: And these days, what's the Gallop or Pew?

Casey Dreier: In terms of do people think we're spending too much on space? No, it's like 20% of people think we're spending too much on space. Do people think we want to go to the moon? That's a bigger interesting question. When people rank what they want NASA to do, the very stuff that they put at the top is what we tend to spend the least amount of money on. It's climate observations, called looking for asteroids that could kill us, and then space science. Again, going to the moon and Mars is at the very, very bottom of the list.

Nayeema Raza: The practical stuff ends up at the top of this list, the less practical stuff ends up at the bottom, but we spend the money in the inverted way.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, just flip it upside down and that's-

Nayeema Raza: Just flip it upside down.

Casey Dreier: What we spend the money on.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, because there's something sexy and media friendly about, oh, here's a guy walking on the... I mean, to your point, we want to shake that guy's hand. Nobody wants to shake the hand of the computer that's doing climate observations.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, that's true. And I think also, there's no single issue voters on space. And so-

Nayeema Raza: Are you not a single issue voter on space?

Casey Dreier: I am not a single issue voter.

Nayeema Raza: I mean, you're wearing that T-shirt, Casey. I feel like it's an ad for single-

Casey Dreier: I'm about as close as one gets probably, but even I am not a single issue voter.

Nayeema Raza: I'm probably a good stand-in for the demo of people who are a little bit, not cynical, but skeptical about, or maybe a little cynical, about space investment. Because I, like many people, think, "Okay, there's a lot that's broken on earth." And yet, I think it makes sense to spend some money on it. Maybe not all our money, but spend some money, allocate some percentage of budget on it. But given the state of healthcare in America today, given the state of education in the United States today, given the fact that we have by some estimates, one in six children living under the poverty line in America, it's hard to think, "Okay, well, why are we then taking dollars and putting it into sending dudes to space?"

Casey Dreier: Right, I have lots of ways to talk about that and they're all reasonable questions. And I think it's really important to talk about because that's a lot. Space is so visibly dramatic, it looks expensive, right? Rockets are big. As I just experienced, the things, rovers on Mars, International Space Station, all these things, they're big and very dramatic looking and we tend to talk about them with their cost as one of their adjectives. But we spend, if you talk about these childhood poverty, healthcare and social support, we do spend. That is the priority. If you look at, we spent $6 trillion last year. NASA was $25 billion of that, so that's less than one half of 1%. Every six days we spend NASA's budget on Medicare.

SNAP and food benefits get four to five times as much money per year as NASA does. So it's one of those things, and the administrative of NASA, think James Beggs back in the 1970s answered this question and said, "If NASA was the thing standing in the way of eradicating childhood poverty in this country, then I personally would shut down the agency and do that." But $25 billion is not going to make that difference. And so we were a big and wealthy country, we can do lots of things at the same time. I think we have the right priorities. I think we can actually increase and by doing these things with NASA, what it is, it's kind of adding to this long-term, high payoff investment.

So you make relatively modest investments in these kind of long-term things because you don't know what kind of benefits you get from them, but the act of even doing it, I think is really important because it gives... You talk about education. The way that going into space and doing space missions, but they always pull students into them, they always pull people. They're dragging a magnet and suddenly all these iron filings pop onto it out of the blue. These types of things that you have a mission like that, people want to come. You draw out that talent and you feed them into these pipelines of engineering and science and critical thinking, and then they don't all work for NASA, they go and dissipate elsewhere.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah. And to that point, it's about the process, too. It's not just the outcome, it's a process of trying to do the thing makes us better as a civilization.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it forces cooperation. You have to cooperate together in thousands. No one person can go into space and build a spacecraft. It forces, I mean, it-

Nayeema Raza: Have you ever tried?

Casey Dreier: It didn't go well.

Nayeema Raza: I feel like when I was a kid, I totally tried to do that.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, and there's also the theories of the lone inventors who do things, but it's so complicated. And to go into space, it supercharges all these other aspects of our economy. I always say it's like why does Mercedes build F1 racing cars? They're not selling them at scale, they're doing it to challenge themselves so their engineers are the best because they're going into the most extreme situations.

Nayeema Raza: I just felt it was one guy at Mercedes executive team had a desire to be an F1 guy.

Casey Dreier: Really fast car racing.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, there's always some. There's a CMO who says, "Hey, I really want to be an F1 driver or hang out with them."

Casey Dreier: Right, but it's so expensive, I guess they couldn't get away with that, right?

Nayeema Raza: That's true.

Casey Dreier: But it's like we're training for a triathlon, NASA is our national triathlon that we train for.

Nayeema Raza: I love that, a national triathlon that we're training for. Okay, what are the parts of this triathlon? It's not swim, bike and run. It's like-

Casey Dreier: It's workforce, industrial capability and scientific novelty would be my-

Nayeema Raza: Okay, workforce, industrial. Okay, great. Scientific novelty, I love that. Give me three concrete ways that space, and whether it's space science or human flight, and I want to talk about the distinction between those two things and the kind of warring budgets over those two things in a minute, but how does space make my life better? Three ways.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Well, we have GPS.

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: That's a good thing to have.

Nayeema Raza: I like it, I would be lost all the time.

Casey Dreier: Literally, it tells us where to go.

Nayeema Raza: Literally, Esther Perel was on the show and she had one of her questions, was, "Why do some people have a good sense of direction and others don't?" And I was like, "Well, those people do not have GPS."

Casey Dreier: Yeah, we basically offloaded that onto our phones.

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: I mean, that's a space-based network and we have to know how space works. Even like general relativity, we have to know how that works in order to properly make it effectively give us the right directions. Instant communication across the world is great. The fact that we have smartphones to begin with, one of the early benefits of NASA and Apollo during the moon race was the development of semiconductors and the creation of them to such high standards of quality because they had to work. You have no failure options in space. You have one thing go wrong and you basically blow up. And so that degree, again, of challenge forces us to make really good components in that it actually forced us to miniaturize computers.

One of the big sub-projects of Apollo is making a computer that could fit into a glove box-size thing. And so because space is such an extreme environment, it forces engineering to become extreme and become clever and efficient. Solar panels, very good example of this. These ideas that you have to use the sun because you can't bring the fuel with you. So you go into weird places, you're forced to think of weird and creative new things. It's this engine for being creative and challenging yourself because we put these weird constraints on ourselves. Without that, we don't have any of those things.

Nayeema Raza: I like solar panels, I'm into GPS, deeply into GPS. I don't feel as good about my smartphone some days, but I like these chips, sure. What about things that don't yet exist that might exist because we're investing? By the way, you're bringing me along. You're making me less skeptical.

Casey Dreier: Good [inaudible 00:24:37] about that.

Nayeema Raza: I don't know if I'm an easy mark, but what about things that we don't know yet? For example, energy and outer space, like space energy, is that going to fix climate change?

Casey Dreier: Well, think about it this way. Again, you're adding these constraints. You want to go to the moon.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Send people on the moon. So the moon, nighttime on the moon, everyone knows, two weeks long, so you can't use solar panels. You can't bring enough batteries with you the last two weeks. So you need some other source of power to power your life support and your radios and keep you alive, so it's basically nuclear power. And so, can you make something small, reliable, safe, something you can launch on a rocket that's then really resilient? Because rockets aren't gentle, they shake real hard. So again, you are adding constraint, constraint, constraint, constraint.

So now we have to think of ways to build high density, high performance, high reliability, little nuclear reactors that we can use to power things. That sounds like a great way to help solve our energy crisis. Again, even the fact that we're talking about climate change. The idea of global warming, where did that come from? So the first time we started looking at Venus with radio waves in the 1960s, this planet that we thought was, "Oh, it's probably some jungle planet full of rain and tropical." It was 900 degrees. They had to double check, 900 degrees. And they realized the theory of global warming came from observing Venus. They were like, "Oh, well, could that happen here? What caused it? Oh, there's a ton of CO2 in the atmosphere."

Nayeema Raza: I didn't know that came from Venus.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it was early '60s, the concept of global warming. Then they started to apply it to nuclear winters and kind of run away global warming effects. All that was originally traced back because we didn't know the climate could change that dramatically. Mars presents this other outlier. It's like the three bears, you have your too hot, your too cold is Mars.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, Goldilocks.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, Goldilocks. You have Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold. So Mars, the opposite problem. It's atmosphere functionally went away. And so you have these two outliers of what can happen, these catastrophic climate changes. Neither planet started like that. And so these types of things like, "Oh, our own climate can change too, and it can be dynamic and it could potentially change in really radical ways."

Nayeema Raza: Do you think there are climate deniers in Venus and Mars?

Casey Dreier: There's always... I mean, you would have to accept that at a certain level if you deny climate is changing here on earth. But I mean, it breaks our expectations to realize things. Even again, looking out into space, mathematics was invented basically to track the motions of stars, geometry was. So space already did us a solid, inventing math for us that we can then apply to create the modern world.

Nayeema Raza: I know Neil deGrasse Tyson told me this. I asked him if aliens were to come to Earth, what language would they speak? Oh, look, they're coming. They're coming in these sirens that we're hearing right now on this podcast in New York City. But no, I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If aliens were to come to Earth, what language would they speak?" And he said, "Oh, math. Easy, math."

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: I'm like, "Well, I got to learn good math." My trigonometry, my calculus BC is really struggling these days.

Casey Dreier: Right, we all better brush up on it. Well, it's like everything that we've sent out of the solar system, like the golden record on Voyager, are you familiar with that, right?

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: They put other plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft.

Nayeema Raza: Explain what it is, we put a bunch of great music.

Casey Dreier: It actually is a ton of great music, it's the word for hello in 140 languages. But imprinted on the cover of the record is a representation of the spacecraft and where the earth is, and they identify where the earth is. There's basic binary things that they create. They use mathematics as a fundamental language and they try to identify the location of the earth based on pulsar timings of various nearby pulsars. And so we've literally written ourselves a language of mathematics onto spacecraft we have sent that will never come back from the solar system. So that's our effort to try to have some sort of universal... Because at the end of the day, there's atoms, and every atom has a discrete number of protons in it. So every advanced species will have to know how to count, because it's the physical things of which we're all made up on are quantized. And so everyone will have count.

Nayeema Raza: Before we spoke, we counted, I guess.

Casey Dreier: Well, we have to think. Yeah, that's true, I guess.

Nayeema Raza: We had to at least conceive of number.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, absolutely. That things, you have discrete quantities of things, that everyone can agree the same number they are too, right? Because the other thing, no matter what cultural background you are, you can count to three, means the same thing.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back with the rest of Casey Dreier's conversation with Nayeema Raza on Smart Girl Dumb Questions after this short break.

Bill Nye: Greetings, Bill Nye here, CEO of The Planetary Society. We are a community of people dedicated to the scientific exploration of space. We're explorers dedicated to making the future better for all humankind. Now, as the world's largest independent space organization, we are rallying public support for space exploration, making sure that there is real funding, especially for NASA science. Now, we've had some success during this challenging year, but along with advocacy, we have our Step Initiative and our Neo Shoemaker grants, so please support us. We want to finish 2025 strong and keep that momentum going into 2026. So check us out at planetary.org/planetaryfund today. Thank you.

Nayeema Raza: I want to spend the second part of this conversation really diving into what's happening right now in the United States as it relates to all of this. You have convinced me now, space is important. We should be investing more in science as it relates to space. Explain to me right now what's happening with this political conversation, because when we spoke a few weeks ago, on the table was a Trump budget proposal that would've cut NASA funding by-

Casey Dreier: 25%.

Nayeema Raza: 25%, bringing it to levels that were lower at any point than?

Casey Dreier: 1961 before the first humans went into space.

Nayeema Raza: Yes. And you were alarmed.

Casey Dreier: Yes.

Nayeema Raza: Even as a non-single issue voter, you were very alarmed.

Casey Dreier: That seems bad to me. I mean, it is bad. And within that, science would be cut in half, and that's a lot to cut in one year.

Nayeema Raza: And as we're taping this, there's been pushback on that proposal from the administration. So all of a sudden, you're seeing congressional representatives across both parties saying, "Hey, you know what? We don't really want to cut NASA by 25%." So what's up right now on September 26th as we're taping this? Which might be different than when people hear this.

Casey Dreier: It very well could be different. We have both houses of Congress, House and Senate, they make their own budgets and then they have to eventually kind of work out the differences between the two, but they start making their own in response to what the proposal was. And both House and Senate, which are again, controlled by the president's own party, flat out reject that level of cuts to NASA, which is great. I mean, this goes to why it's not a partisan issue. And this level of rejection, it's rare to see that level of rejection among the party these days, and it just needs to get over the finish line. So we've seen a lot of progress in a sense we've made the case successfully that this is a bad idea, and to do so would be to undermine a lot of these things we just talked about. But again, that's also this deeper symbolic, are we a country that goes out and does this or do we just kind of stop and-

Nayeema Raza: And let someone else do it.

Casey Dreier: And let someone else do it, or they just found hints of a potential bio-signature, potential sign of life on Mars. It is wrapped up in a little tube, ready for us to bring back to earth. We can test that, we have a hypothesis to test was this life or not?

Nayeema Raza: When will we know?

Casey Dreier: Well, we have to bring it back, which this budget cancels the effort to do.

Nayeema Raza: How much does it cost to bring that little vial back?

Casey Dreier: We're not sure. Probably $6 billion to $7 billion all together.

Nayeema Raza: $6 billion to $7 billion?

Casey Dreier: Over the course of 10 years, though.

Nayeema Raza: And then we will know?

Casey Dreier: And then we will know if that was life or not.

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: So I mean, we have the strongest chance-

Nayeema Raza: And there's also Jupiter, there's also-

Casey Dreier: There's a big ocean moon at Jupiter, yep. Europa has a big underground ocean. There are things that we can do right now, but I think that for example, again, we have this potential bio-signature on Mars. If we want to, we can validate if that's life or not.

Nayeema Raza: Right, but that's under threat right now in the current administration.

Casey Dreier: It's completely canceled in this idea. Do we see this and say... Again, this is why this bigger symbol. We are presented with the most exciting potential find in the history of science, life beyond earth. Maybe, I guess, "We'll see you, we won't do this." We'll see. That would've been interesting. Oh, well. There's something really sad about that to me, if we don't do that.

Nayeema Raza: Part of it is like paperwork, I think, but people get bored by the paperwork. It's like everyone's excited and we're like, "Yes, we would love to know if there's other life in the cosmos." Yeah, we're curious about it. Yeah, we like GPS. But then they're like, "Can you fill out the forms and dot the T's and call your local congressperson?"

Casey Dreier: Yeah, right. Well, I mean, this is why we have good engineers to do it for us. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to get through that sometimes.

Nayeema Raza: But also, the paperwork of how this stuff happens in Congress. And so there's that famous Schoolhouse Rock thing where it's like how a bill becomes a law.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: How does an idea for space science become a dollar toward that idea?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I mean, that process of... I mean, I go over back, how does it start in the spark of some guy's or some woman's brain as a spark of neurons to say, "Let's do this mission to bring back a sample from Mars?" And then it has to incite enough neurons in other people's brains and this cascading consequence to finally have someone write that down, make someone's neurons fire to write this down into a piece of legislation. But I mean, saying that all happens, we want to do this, you have to work with these parts of Congress that have responsibility for funding NASA.

Nayeema Raza: Which are?

Casey Dreier: It's the Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee of Appropriations, CJS. But the government's funded, they break it up into 12 committees so big. And so this is the one that does NASA, also does Justice Department for some reason and Commerce Department, it's kind of all thrown into a grab bag. And it's in these, if you're a member on this committee, you basically get to kind of say what your priorities are. You get a chunk of money from your appropriations leadership and you can apply it to NASA for various things.

Usually the White House will request to start a new program, in this case, Mars sample return, and then Congress will give them money to do it or not. And then they'll go through, they'll vote and then President signs it into law. But that has to happen every single year. It takes a long time to build a spacecraft. You're not just going to the Walmart and swiping Uncle Sam's credit card and buying a spacecraft off the shelf.

Nayeema Raza: I would like to go buy a spacecraft like that.

Casey Dreier: That would be really cool store.

Nayeema Raza: I feel like when I was seven, I would've liked to go buy that.

Casey Dreier: At the Rover store.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, but I don't think my credit card limit is sufficient to afford that. How much is a spaceship?

Casey Dreier: It depends what you want to do. I'd say it ranges from half a billion to about $5 billion.

Nayeema Raza: Okay. Yeah, I can't afford any of that range, so that's a good range.

Casey Dreier: Put it on credit.

Nayeema Raza: We like it. Maybe one day I can buy the Mercedes F1 car.

Casey Dreier: Something to aim for.

Nayeema Raza: And also, you said Nixon took it out of the whole?

Casey Dreier: Basically. For a long time, NASA was considered almost like a national security initiative. So they got top priority, they got whatever money they needed and they got top priority for resources and personnel. And then when Apollo ended, he said, "Nope, you're just like everyone else."

Nayeema Raza: So now NASA is just like everyone else still to this day?

Casey Dreier: Yep.

Nayeema Raza: So it doesn't have, despite we do have a US Space Force happening.

Casey Dreier: Which has a bigger budget than NASA now.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, which is related to the Department of Defense.

Casey Dreier: Yes, it is a branch of the armed services

Nayeema Raza: Right, or Department of War as it's called these days.

Casey Dreier: It's not, that's called Department of Defense.

Nayeema Raza: Right. And you're saying Space Force has larger budget than NASA.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: But can Space Force do what Space Force needs to do without NASA?

Casey Dreier: Probably.

Nayeema Raza: Really?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, because they're the national security priority, that's where the money is.

Nayeema Raza: But all the science and the exploration and the knowledge that comes out of NASA probably informs what Space Force is up to, right?

Casey Dreier: It can help. But I mean, NASA specifically was set up to not be national security.

Nayeema Raza: Yes.

Casey Dreier: It was written into, and this is at the time, it was very important that this be a peaceful expression of the United States, that it not be connected to Department of Defense because it wasn't supposed to be. You didn't want to incite the Soviets, you didn't want to make it a war. There's fundamental things. Yes, rocket development technology will inform missile development technology. But generally, I think the intuition is NASA is the nice thing and NASA benefits from those types of investments backwards as well. So I mean, that's the thing. A lot of people think NASA is the same thing or represents the same military industrial complex. It really doesn't.

Nayeema Raza: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and that is what it's doing. It's administering science, it's administering space. No, that's not at all what it's doing.

Casey Dreier: It's a funny name when you think about it.

Nayeema Raza: It's a terrible name.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it's like administration. Why is it a NASA administrator?

Nayeema Raza: It's a good acronym and a bad name.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it's one of those things where I think 1958 is when they're putting this together. I guess they thought it sounded like... They actually took, there was all these aviation research centers across the country that they just, "Now you're part of NASA." Not the first day in NASA, right? Aeronautics. And then they kind of grabbed some other rocket centers and they pulled some things out of army bases that were developing rockets and they just all called that NASA.

Nayeema Raza: Okay, so part of the debate over the NASA budget this year was about this tension between space science and human space flight or space exploration. Are those euphemisms, human space flight?

Casey Dreier: No, they're not actually. Because there's the International Space Station doesn't explore anywhere, just goes around earth. So that's what's called space operations, the least exciting section of NASA. But I think the point, NASA's broken up into chunks. And so what NASA does in science, science is all the stuff you do with robots and space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nayeema Raza: We love the Hubble Telescope.

Casey Dreier: I love the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope and earth science and climate observations, that's all in NASA science as well. And then the human space fight, again, anything with people involved in it. And that involves-

Nayeema Raza: That's Katy Perry going to the moon. Just kidding.

Casey Dreier: That's our new commercial and private space sector going-

Nayeema Raza: Into eight minutes into outer space and coming right back.

Casey Dreier: Captain Kirk himself, William [inaudible 00:38:48] flew on the Blue Origin flight. And he saw space and basically lost his mind temporarily. Did you ever see that?

Nayeema Raza: No.

Casey Dreier: He went into space and saw how dark the blackness was and how blue and pristine the earth was. And for playing Star Trek character and going into space, he was like, "Space sucks. I don't want to..." You live on Earth. He came back with this really intense, emotionally driven response, coming back. William Shatner, I should say. And that experience can be really transformative for a lot of people when you go up into space. Because again, space is where you're supposed to live the least. The space wants to kill you all the time and you do one wrong thing and you will die in space.

Nayeema Raza: No energy, hard to get some water.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. And you bring up a bubble of earth with you. And when you see exactly how harsh and unpleasant, you realize what a comparative Eden we have here on earth.

Nayeema Raza: Stack rank them, going to Mars, going to the moon, taking photos. What's important? What do you think is important? This is your perspective.

Casey Dreier: I think science is the most important thing because it goes further. The universe is really big. Humans could probably only ever go to moon and Mars because the universe is just too big to go anywhere else. So understanding how the universe works and where we're coming and where we came from and where we're going, that if you really want to test out if a theory of the world is correct, is universal, test it somewhere else out in the universe.

You can't just assume everything you measure on earth is correct, you have to go somewhere else to validate it. And that process of figuring things out and forcing ourselves to change our understanding of the world and how things work by going out into space specifically for curiosity and looking for things is really, really important for us. Human space flight's important, too. And then I'd put, aeronautics is good, too.

Nayeema Raza: Aeronautics is good too, the A in NASA. But yet, we spend all this money trying to get people into the moon and less money on science. What are some of the things that would be cut in the budget if the, not 25% cut, but even the haircut?

Casey Dreier: 50%, yeah.

Nayeema Raza: Even the haircut happens, even a haircut to science happened. Will we lose some of these telescopes we love so much?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, we'd lose some of the... Hubble, they would reduce the amount of science they do on the Hubble Space Telescope, they'd reduce the amount of science they do on James Webb. They would literally cancel some of the-

Nayeema Raza: When you say reduce the amount of science, you mean less?

Casey Dreier: What scientists do, they apply what's called for time. And so they say, "Oh, I want to study this thing in the universe with the Hubble Space Telescope." And if it's good enough, it's very competitive, they'll say, "Okay, you'll get however many days it takes to observe this, and here's some money to research the data when you get it back." Science doesn't mean anything unless you have scientists to figure out what the data says. And so when they have less money, you just pay fewer scientists, you just do less science.

Nayeema Raza: Do more people want to be scientists now than 10, 15, 20 years ago, or-

Casey Dreier: I hope so.

Nayeema Raza: Is that going down? Doctors are going down a bit.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Nayeema Raza: Is there a similar question?

Casey Dreier: I think a lot of people are questioning right now, whether they want to.

Nayeema Raza: Also, there's a lot of people who might want to do that, but then not be scientists in the academic sector, but go instead to work on say, Elon Musk's SpaceX missions.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, or just go into any tech or just whatever. I think that would be sad. I think not everyone needs to do it, and even people who go and get these degrees then can also then go work for these places. Google always used to snatch up the people who would design Rover software because it cannot fail. You're designing the most reliable space software, so great for infrastructure for Google or something like that and you can make a lot of money that way. And so again, it's like you're picking out these hyper-performant equivalent of athletes, but at the end of the day, I think this is why you need exciting things to do because it inspires people to come and do them. And the fewer exciting things we do, the fewer people are going to come out and do them.

Nayeema Raza: And I like the four-time explanation because I didn't get that. Basically what you need for science to happen is a bunch of nerdy guys and gals to go to a library and rent a book, but not really a book. Not a book in this case, but it's the access to the technology. It comes with a stipend, and then you basically go out and you figure some stuff out and you come back home with more pictures, more knowledge, more advancement of the actual infrastructure itself. You can make the telescope better, even.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of these projects start with a single scientist or a group of scientists like, "Okay, we've pushed the limits of our one tool. How can we even do better? What's the biggest question that we know right now that we don't know the answer to? How can we solve that?" And that's actually how a lot of decisions get made on the science side. This, we don't know. We all think this is important. Here's how we figure it out, we make this mission to do it. And that's actually to me, a really inspiring thing that we can just say, "Oh, what's curious? Let's figure it out."

Nayeema Raza: Let's go figure it out. Right now, sitting here, you were alarmed before. How do you feel right now, are you optimistic?

Casey Dreier: Slightly less alarmed, but still alarmed.

Nayeema Raza: Because every year, even if you win this fight this year-

Casey Dreier: It could come back.

Nayeema Raza: In 2025, it'll come back. Because the thinking now is, "We'd rather send dudes into space than invest in the science that enables-"

Casey Dreier: They've specifically deprioritized. They're saying science is just not what NASA does anymore. There's things in some of these budgets that says, "Nope, NASA's job is to send humans to moon and Mars."

Nayeema Raza: But who's supposed to do science if NASA isn't doing science and if universities are losing budgets to do science?

Casey Dreier: That's the outcome, right? Commercial industry will not do science for you. There's no money in it by definition, it's a fundamental inquisition-

Nayeema Raza: Some corporations have science teams.

Casey Dreier: But they do applied science.

Nayeema Raza: Health and science teams, yeah.

Casey Dreier: They do applied science. I mean, there's no market incentive to go to Europa, right?

Nayeema Raza: Isn't there so much of our research in health? Come like healthcare, which is a crazy analogy, but one of the things we worry about in our health system, and you hear people in the kind of MAHA movement worried about this, is that so many of the studies are paid by private enterprise to discover things.

Casey Dreier: I mean, even that, I don't even think they would bother to do. So we have all these examples of private space companies sending people into space, you were talking about commercial spaceflight, but there's zero examples of any private company or any commercial company launching a spacecraft to do any kind of science. And so there's materials tests that they can do, but it's all very, very practical stuff. Which isn't bad, there's nothing inherently bad with it.

But if you want to address these bigger, more fundamental, more profound questions, there's no immediate... That's like why we have a public space agency, is to do these things that have no other avenue by which to do them, and has some of these bigger benefits and is done in a way that's intentionally meant to kind of bring the whole nation along with it.

Nayeema Raza: You guys have how many thousands of members, tens of thousands?

Casey Dreier: Over 50,000 paying members, and then millions of people who follow us.

Nayeema Raza: This is at Planetary Society?

Casey Dreier: At planetary society. We don't get any benefit from achieving these policies beyond enjoying the pictures and the data and the excitement. And it's nice because we're one of the few organizations that cares about just the science aspect of it. And it's a real pleasure to be able to do that because it is so exciting.

Nayeema Raza: When you look at someone like Elon Musk, who's been invested more in the commercial aspects of space than the science of it, would you say?

Casey Dreier: Yeah, absolutely.

Nayeema Raza: Has he contributed to science?

Casey Dreier: Nope.

Nayeema Raza: No?

Casey Dreier: Nope. I mean, SpaceX Rockets will launch science missions, but NASA buys them.

Nayeema Raza: Got it.

Casey Dreier: So it's helped lower the cost to launch some things. But I mean, that kind of goes to my entire point, that SpaceX will not replace any of these things. SpaceX will not make a Hubble Space Telescope. I mean, they theoretically could, but they've shown no intention or desire to do so. And there's no incentive. Even though they could pay for it themselves, that's just not what they believe in doing.

Nayeema Raza: You used the word techno-optimism earlier in our conversation. Do you think that there's been a replacement of the word science in our culture with technology?

Casey Dreier: Yes.

Nayeema Raza: Like we're going to invest in technology, we're not going to invest in science?

Casey Dreier: The thing that drove me the craziest about the Avengers movies-

Nayeema Raza: Oh, tell me.

Casey Dreier: Was that Tony Stark, at the last one, solved some quantum equation for time travel or something. He's an engineer, he's not a scientist. He's not just going to like... That's exactly the thing. Some wealthy engineer will not suddenly develop a whole new theory of science beneath it. They're distinct skills and distinct capabilities, and the ability to assert that anyone who is smart in one area can also do something as equally well in a completely different field is folly. And I think we're seeing that to some degree, there's no universal intelligence.

Nayeema Raza: Right.

Casey Dreier: And so that ability to do science, it is very distinct from. It's related, but engineering is a very different discipline. Science is about fundamental conceptions of how things work that will enable us to use engineering or to apply and utilize that new knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily tell us fundamental truths.

Nayeema Raza: Bill Nye, who runs the organization, is an engineer by training.

Casey Dreier: How ironic.

Nayeema Raza: Is an engineer by training.

Casey Dreier: He's an engineer by training,

Nayeema Raza: But a science communicator and a science guy.

Casey Dreier: He's a science guy.

Nayeema Raza: By vocation.

Casey Dreier: That's what I mean, it's not that you can't talk about science. I think you have a science mindset. Is that the skepticism, the idea that your priors can be changed, that data should modify your thinking as it comes in?

Nayeema Raza: Right, the scientific method.

Casey Dreier: The scientific method is at the heart of it, and it's the engineering is usually about solving a specific problem.

Nayeema Raza: Yeah, move fast and break things sometimes.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, which, they're creating problems, but science itself is about addressing, again, the fundamental truths.

Nayeema Raza: Penultimate question here, is space too capitalist?

Casey Dreier: I think there has been a shift in the last 10 years that, yes, the way that we talk about it, particularly in this country, that space has become something to extract value from, rather than say, what can it give us by going out and looking? It's not that we shouldn't be a part of that, but I think seeing it only as a way to enrich ourselves or to take stuff from to enable our existence, that we've become too utilitarian with it. I do think there is a truth. Again, we're starting with this religiosity of space. There is something fundamental to it. Going into space does make you feel something, seeing a rocket launch does make you feel something. Looking at a Hubble deep field of where every point of light is a galaxy, not a star, and seeing how big things are and how small you are, that makes you feel something.

There are very few things that the government does that evoke that within you, and that we do as a society that's secular and fully welcoming to everybody. No one has to have any special training to see this. And so to completely ignore that part for the idea that we can just take, take, take, I think diminishes the opportunity we have here and diminishes something really, really valuable that it provides us. And so I think the way that we've talked about it, again, as a pure way to give us something else is becoming too narrow-minded in it, so I hope we shift back a little bit.

Nayeema Raza: All right, I end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking my guest something that they are dumb about or don't know, a question that they have that they haven't yet figured out. Ideally, not one in your domain. What do you got?

Casey Dreier: Lots of things I don't know, I wish I did. But I have a toddler right now and I'm particularly interested in witnessing the development of consciousness and development of awareness. And I was just wondering the other day, when does a human, as they're growing up, start to differentiate between now and the past or now and the future?

Nayeema Raza: Time.

Casey Dreier: Right.

Nayeema Raza: Wow.

Casey Dreier: You think about it, that's pretty abstract. When does a little kid start to realize that there are things that will happen but haven't happened yet, and things that have happened and are impossible to change?

Nayeema Raza: So interesting because I also think that's kind of like what you said about the universal language of math. We all kind of agree that yesterday was yesterday and tomorrow's tomorrow and today's today.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, we all agree-

Nayeema Raza: It's a shared consciousness.

Casey Dreier: Temporal, yeah, reality exists. And so there must be something really fundamental, but it's interesting. At what point does that awareness develop?

Nayeema Raza: How old is your child now?

Casey Dreier: Two years and two months. And yes, she started to use the words yesterday and tomorrow in the last couple of weeks.

Nayeema Raza: Oh, wow.

Casey Dreier: And so it's like, "At what point did she figure that out?" Because you can't teach it, you don't have the words to teach it. And she uses yesterday for anything that's happened before, which is-

Nayeema Raza: I was going to say, that's the thing with my god kids. It's very funny because I will sometimes try to implement a sense of time. When they're upset about something, I'll say, "If you're still upset in 10 minutes, let me know." And invariably, 30 seconds or 10 minutes later, I'm still upset. I'm like, "It's only been 30, watch that clock."

Casey Dreier: So it must start as this very broad delineation before and after and now. And then you can start adding refinements. Yesterday means after the sun has set and come back up or something like that. But there must be some fundamental intuition about before and after. And a lot of, I don't think animals tend not to have a sense of the future in planning, so I'd love to know more about that.

Nayeema Raza: Well, I also am like, "Wait, is time a scam?" I actually had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. "What is time, how does it work? How do we know it's real?" And I've read a lot of Carlo Rovelli, so I know, I understand time, but it also still baffles me. And I'm always over time, as we are with you. We got to get you out of here. Today you sat down with me, thank you so much for doing that. Tomorrow, if people listening or watching want to find you, what is the best way to find you, Casey?

Casey Dreier: Planetary.org, also my podcast. If you love talking about, if you're curious about space policy, you want to go into depth, Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition is my monthly podcast. I think it's pretty interesting, but it's a fun thing for me to do to explore things at very deep levels, but accessible.

Nayeema Raza: I've listened to a few episodes in preparation for this, I loved it.

Casey Dreier: Great.

Nayeema Raza: I particularly liked the view of space energy, space vision. It was blowing my mind and yeah, I really recommend it so check out-

Casey Dreier: Thank you very much.

Nayeema Raza: Space policy Edition of Planetary Diaries. Notes to self, after that interview, I definitely need to go watch a rocket launch because it seemed like a very spiritual experience. I loved speaking to Casey. I actually love having subject matter experts on my show and just going really deep with them into one core area of the world. I did enter this conversation a little bit skeptical about space, not like a don't fund it at all, shut down NASA girl. But I left it thinking, "Oh my God, we cannot lose any of this telescope imagery and we have to keep this library open for the nerds in our world to come and do more science." And speaking of science, you cannot miss my episode with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, which is coming up next on Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Make sure you hit follow or subscribe to this feed so that you do not miss the next episode.

Bill is my childhood hero, he's Casey's colleague at The Planetary Society, and we dig deep into what happened to science. And that's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. If you liked today's episode, you're going to love my third ever episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he answered all my dumb questions about the cosmos. You can scroll down and check that out wherever you're watching or listening to the show. And also, please leave us a review, a comment, and share this show with your friends. Make it a curiosity party. You and they can search for Smart Girl Dumb Questions and hit follow or subscribe on Spotify or on Apple, on YouTube or wherever you get your shows. Today's episode was produced with Annalisa Cochran. It was recorded and edited by Destah from Wonder Studios. Our Onsite Mixer with Jared Saldiviera. I'm your host, Nayeema Raza, who is lucky to have such an awesome team. See you next week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I want to send a huge thanks to the team over at Smart Girl Dumb Questions for allowing us to share this conversation so everyone on our Planetary Radio team can take a nice vacation, but also for sharing why we love space exploration with a whole new audience. I think these are such valid questions and I hear them from people all the time, even people that love space exploration. And if today's episode made you think, "Hey, I've got a question," because I know it did for me, Nayeema would love to hear it. You can send all of your own queries to Smart Girl Dumb Questions through their podcast channels and social media. And now it's time for a short US Thanksgiving edition of What's Up? with our Chief Scientist, Dr. Bruce Betts. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah. Happy almost American Thanksgiving Day.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: A good time for us to reflect on what we're grateful for. Bruce, what planet are you most thankful for?

Bruce Betts: Whoa.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Whoa.

Bruce Betts: Well, it's kind of lame, but I have to say Earth to start out with and then I'll give you another one. Because there's that whole living thing that Earth facilitates and none of the others do. But other than that, I'd go with Mars because of a lot of reasons. One, I think it's cool. Two, work having to do with that allowed me to be occasionally called doctor for the rest of my life. And three, that it's the place where we discover water every year or two. I mean, the moon's competing now, but Mars, there's always something. "I discovered water." It's like, "Guys, we've known there's water there." And lest we forget, my favorite color is red. What's your favorite planet?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I would say, because when I was a small child, the pictures of Saturn were always my favorite. So I'm going to go with Saturn, not only because it's so pretty, that I think it's gotten a lot of people into space exploration just because of the images, but also because I'm really thankful that we live in a time where the rings around Saturn still exist. Because those are temporary, and if we didn't have a world like Saturn that had those in our solar system, we would be really weirded out when we found them around some kind of exoplanet somewhere. I think those are really cool.

Bruce Betts: Wow, that's pretty cool. I guess, I'm sorry, that's what you're thankful for. Rings, it is the iconic thing because you show people a circle and they don't know you're talking about a planet, but you have an icon like The Planetary Society logo P these days, it looks like a P and looks like Saturn and you go, "Hey, that's a planet." Yeah, I mean, all the planets, I'm thankful for all of them because they're nifty, neato. And all their moons and all the other little friends in the solar system.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though, of all the places we could live in all of space and time, I know there are hardships here on earth, but I'm really grateful that this is where we be in all of time and space. It's a good place to be.

Speaker 7: Random space rewind.

Bruce Betts: If Mercury were the size of a cranberry, then Jupiter would be about the size of a turkey, and there would of course, be metallic hydrogen stuffing.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man, I don't know if I would want to eat that.

Bruce Betts: I mean, I've never really thought about that, but it would be weird. You'd have to be super pressurized to actually do it, so I think that would be unfortunate for your health. Anyway, no one tuned in to listen to what I think about turkey, or did you? No, probably not. But I do want to say how thankful I am for this show, for you, Sarah, hosting it, for whatever that other guy was who used to host it, for everyone who makes it happen, and most of all, for our listeners. I hope we make you thankful and happy about our solar system and our planets. Back to you in the booth. Sarah, any last comments?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm thankful for you too, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: All right, everybody go up there, go up there, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what you're thankful for. Thank you. Thank you and good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with more space science and exploration. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio T-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review and a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us your space thoughts, questions and poetry at our email, [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, you can leave a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our member community app.

I'd love to hear which planet you're most thankful for. And if the answer is Uranus, you make me laugh. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our members. You can join us at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Casey Dreier is the host of our monthly Space Policy Edition, and Matt Kaplan hosts our monthly book club edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. My name is Sarah Al-Ahmed, the host and producer of Planetary Radio. And until next week, there are no dumb questions. I'm thankful for each and every one of you, and ad astra.