Space Policy Edition: Does the rise of Elon mean the fall of NASA?

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the chief of Space Policy here at The Planetary Society. This is our monthly show that examines the processes that enable space exploration. This month, we have Franklin Foer. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine who recently published a very insightful piece about the role of private industry, of Elon Musk in defining the public's relationship to space and, in his framing, the decline of NASA as a consequence of filling that same role and tying it to larger societal trends of, as he puts it, the parable of government or the loss of trust in government in the United States and placing it in the hands of not a collective enterprise, but an individual enterprise. It's a very interesting piece. If nothing else, it very nicely summarizes the last 25 years of space exploration in the United States and the dynamics and potential consequences of turning over various aspects of control of the space program to an individual.

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and, previously, the author of a number of books, most recently, The Last Politician, Inside Joe Biden's White House, and, prior to that, I think relevantly to this discussion, a book on big tech called the World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Franklin Foer is not a space person. He describes himself as that he's a political commentator, a writer, and I think that's fascinating to explore how he saw NASA before and after he wrote this piece, which was very well-researched. Full confession here, I was a source that he used when putting together this article, but I talked to him many months ago. He spent a long time putting this piece together, and I was impressed by the amount of depth and thought that went into it, seeing this reflection of how the space program presents itself to those, in a sense, outside the activities.

I'm a space fan. I think about space literally every day, most of the day probably. The vast majority of people do not. Seeing how this effort is reflected back through that prism, how it is integrated through a mind like Frank's, that it sees in a broader political and historical trends in the United States, was a really fascinating experience and I was delighted to speak with him. It's, again, a wonderful article. I recommend reading it. Even if you disagree with bits and pieces of it, I think it is a provocative and thought-inspiring piece and worth reading. That's on The Atlantic. It's called How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline.

But before we get to that, I would be remiss if I did not mention our efforts to reverse this decline. We have two things coming up that I should mention. One is our Planetary Society and our broader coalition now of over a dozen different partners of other organizations for our fall Save NASA Science Day of Action. That's where we go to Washington, DC directly and advocate for space science, the thing that NASA does that no one else in the United States does, which is under attack, as you know, if you listen to this show, facing a 50% cut by the White House. We have huge steps forward and potential to address this through Congress, but we need to get this legislation across the finish line. Do you want to help? planetary.org/dayofaction. We're meeting in Washington, DC, October 5th and 6th of 2025 to do what we can to get this word out.

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Now, please welcome Franklin Foer.

Franklin Foer, welcome to the Space Policy Edition. I'm delighted to have you on.

Franklin Foer: I'm so delighted to be here. I've learned so much from this podcast, so thank you.

Casey Dreier: Oh, yeah, that's quite the compliment. Again, I loved your piece-

Franklin Foer: Thank you.

Casey Dreier: ... which, again, was in The Atlantic just the other month, called How NASA Engineered its Own Decline. It covers a number of themes. Before we jump into those, I'm curious for you... I'd characterize you as a non-space person initially, right?

Franklin Foer: Fair.

Casey Dreier: You're not a professional space person.

Franklin Foer: Tough, but fair. Yes.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, we don't beat around the bush on this podcast. We get right to the hard-hitting questions. What was your idea and conception of NASA and the US space program before you started reporting this piece, and what drew you to this topic to want to go into this?

Franklin Foer: When I grew up, I definitely had a poster of Neil Armstrong on my bedroom wall. I grew up in the 1970s, the romance of human space exploration was real and was part of my life. But as you say, I wasn't a space enthusiast. This was just part of my DNA as an American. And then, along the way, I started to have the same questions that I think probably occurs to almost every guest that appears on this podcast. Something happened that this thing that had been the greatest example of the competence of the US government, suddenly was this thing that was no longer achieving anything remotely close to what we had once achieved. So the question was, why?
Mbr> That question had been on my mind for a long time. It happened as I was watching, the Trump campaign started to emerge with Elon Musk playing this starring role in the campaign. I guess I wanted to kind of, in parallel, explore these two things that were long then percolating in the immediate term, which was, "Was there some sort of interconnection between the way in which Musk has stolen NASA's thunder?" and this other question of, "What had happened to NASA?" Obviously, I knew that the NASA story was a much longer, deeper story than the predated, the arrival of Elon Musk on the scene, but it felt like such an interesting big question that I wanted to spend a couple months trying to pull together my reporting, my theories about what had happened.

Casey Dreier: In this process, what surprised you about NASA itself? What did you learn that did deepen your relationship to the space program that you did not... I'm just really interested in this cultural awareness that you had just growing up and then outside of the details of it. Did you feel a reasonable understanding? Was it accurate or did you find that it was an echo or a mirror of something that didn't actually exist in a good or bad way?

Franklin Foer: This is going to sound so elementary, but I guess I kind of knew in the recesses of my brain that there were two sides of the house at NASA, that there was human space flight and there was everything else. Of course, the headlines would often come from the everything else side of the NASA house, but I hadn't quite realized just the extent to which...

Even if we were going to bifurcate NASA in that sort of way, you were telling two separate stories. The story of human space flight is one of insane ambitions where we've often sputtered because of all the deep failings of our political system, essentially, to be able to mobilize this incredible asset that it has, and then the political system oftentimes kind of throwing up its arms and welcoming in whatever Band-Aid solutions it can find, but this kind of zombie thing that really persists.

And then the other side of NASA, which is just astonishing in that, if you look at its track record, the science that was being produced by this agency was still something that was filling in gaps that the market, the academy wasn't able to fulfill. That government was actually managing to answer a lot of the most profound questions about human existence, not in a one-off sort of way, but in a relatively consistent sort of way. While NASA was made for an easy pinata for a lot of politicians, because of the muddled state of our human space exploration, all the rest of the parts of NASA were still astonishing.

Casey Dreier: Do you believe then, through that experience, that human spaceflight functionally then defines NASA to the broader public, and why do you think that is ultimately?

Franklin Foer: Largely, it defines it for the broader public just because that's the part that's most ingrained in our popular culture, that is the most dramatic, that has produced the most moments that the American public has connected with over time, which is not to say that the American public doesn't connect with rovers and telescopes and all the rest. They do connect with it, but it just doesn't tap into that primal part of the American brain in quite the same way.

Casey Dreier: Do you think it's because we're primates, we just need humans, or is it just a narrative aspect of it? Is it the grand scale of human spaceflight? Well, I guess it can't be because... You're really talking about Apollo, right? In your piece, you talked about, in some of your interviews, how the shuttle era... We're still sending humans into space, it's really hard and expensive, but didn't connect on the same way. Through this audacious initial birthing of NASA and the space program, we saw some sort of representation of ourselves go further, and that defined expectations forever forward, do you think, among the broader American people?

Franklin Foer: Obviously, the whole world paid attention to Apollo, but I think, "Why was the United States the country that launched Apollo and why is United States the country that continues to send human beings into space most consistently?" I think it's because the concepts of exploration and of frontiers are so baked into the national narrative, the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and our audaciousness. Going back to the Kennedy era, when John Kennedy first ran for president and he invoked the New frontier, that was obviously a phrase that Wernher von Braun had helped popularize. But when he talked about that phrase, that wasn't what was on his mind. He wasn't a big fan of space exploration and he was really thinking about the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who had declared the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century.

What he wanted to recapture was this sense of American vitality. He was describing basically this contrast between himself and Eisenhower, who he was depicting as a gray, old man, and he was youthful vigor. But this idea that we needed to do something to restore our vitality as a nation in space, it's almost surprising that it took him as long as it did to stumble into space as the program that would best embody that. That's a real part of who we are. There's a lot of tainted history that goes along with it, but there's also kind of a noble spirit attached to that as well. I don't think it's wrong to look to space as an area for expressing this intangible part of who we are.

Casey Dreier: You are, primarily, I'd say a writer of American politics and an observer of the American psyche to some degree. Is that, in a sense, required for the country, or at least seen by certain sectors of the country, and it's like, "We need a space to go to. We need a place to channel our hopes for the future towards"? Does that require some kind of physical manifestation of that space, kind of going back to this Turner theory, and like, "Oh, there's no more land left to go. We have to go to space," and so, therefore, what we do in space must represent that? Is that kind of a romantic story that we tell ourselves? Do we actually psychologically need this as a culture, in your opinion?

Franklin Foer: I don't think we actually need it. I don't think we'll become more violent without ways to channel this fundamental expression of who we are.

Casey Dreier: I guess you talk about vitality though, right?

Franklin Foer: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: One of your theses in this is that you kind of track this decline of NASA as a symbolic representation of decline of a certain kind of ideal of ourselves and our own identity as Americans through our government representation, right? You say that NASA was born at the height of liberalism's faith in government and its demise tracks that decline of that faith, so it says something about it, it seems like.

Franklin Foer: For sure. I think that it's striking, at the moment when American liberalism was seeking to prove itself to itself or prove itself to the country, that it chose space as the realm to do that. Obviously, the Cold War was an important part of that, but I think it was also because, at that moment, it was possible to achieve a measure of consensus around doing this one big, enormously complicated thing that proved our worth as a technological nation. Now, I don't think there's any equivalent need to prove ourselves in that sort of way to the rest of the world. I think our dominance as a technological nation is well-established, but I think that there was also this other part of that project, and the other part of the NASA project, which is that it was baked into a broader cultural desire to expand knowledge in every single realm and that government was willing to invest in the expansion of knowledge by funding the boom in the American university by setting up and financing these institutes that would study and research medicine and that space was a part of that.

It was actually a beautiful thing that we were doing by... Some of this knowledge was done in the name of achieving practical, tangible results, but so much of what we've done in space is really about deeper, more spiritual questions about who we are and where we came from and the mystery that there is this broader universe that encases us that we know exceedingly little about relative to the rest of our knowledge of, say, the human body or our knowledge of human history. Of course, we're going to be curious about that as a species and as a nation. We were doing something I think even more noble than exploration, which was setting out to kind of discover who we are and where we sit.

Casey Dreier: Did that part surprise you when you delve into this topic more?

Franklin Foer: It did. It did. As we've talked about before, I think we both came of age at a certain period in history where, if you thought about space, the first person who had come to mind was Carl Sagan. Sagan was so associated with some of these bigger or deeper, more philosophical reasons for going into space and for thinking about space and for exploring space. That's fallen to the side I think culturally, which is not that shocking when you look at certain events, like the rise of Silicon Valley and the way in which engineering, which in the 1950s was this profession that was weirdly detached from the rest of professions, which was weirdly detached from politics and status, has suddenly come rocketing, to use a terrible-

Casey Dreier: An apt metaphor, yeah.

Franklin Foer: ... has come roaring into the culture as maybe the profession that, for a brief period of time, had more prestige than any others. Engineering is something that I've been obsessed with as a profession for a long time. When I was a young reporter, I was just thinking about the re-composition of the American elite. Just as kind of a personal study, I looked at Vanity Fair, which was, once upon a time, a magazine that once appeared in print, it's very glossy, had a whole lot of cultural prestige, and it would come up with lists of the new establishment. I was just curious. I was like, "Where does this new establishment that they were describing in the early 21st century come from, and what was their professional basis?" I just made my own little list, I can't remember what percentage, but a huge percentage of the people who were in the new establishment in America were actually people who had trained as engineers, who brought an engineering mindset to the way that they thought about, not just their companies, but thought about the American public.

Casey Dreier: Do you include software engineering in this?

Franklin Foer: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Or like physical engineers... So just, in a sense, applied organization, creation, and, as you said, through companies-

Franklin Foer: And a mindset about also efficiency and achieving efficiency, which-

Casey Dreier: Optimizations, yeah. Do you think that was a turning point at the century, 20th to 21st century, that that began to really take over through software?

Franklin Foer: Yeah. In a way, you look at Elon Musk's brief triumph and the way... He actually established a department of government efficiency where there was an engineer in charge of remaking the American state in order to achieve that state of more perfect optimization.

Casey Dreier: I might know the answer. Your opinion of the technocratic engineering theory, is that improved or diminished after the DOGE experiment with Elon Musk through this process? What do you take it, if not?

Franklin Foer: Well, I've always been a skeptic of government by engineer in that type of technocracy just because it so quickly becomes amoral. I think that we saw that in the way that the Department of Government Efficiency unfolded, I don't know if this is a terribly rational way of thinking about things, but it was based on certain keywords that had become fetish-ized within Silicon Valley, which was that you needed radical disruption, you needed to break systems in order to create new systems. There was just a randomness to the way that DOGE went about trying to dismantle what had been in the name of imposing something new and more efficient.

Casey Dreier: Do you think that's because engineers tend to work in domains that are quantizable or quantified in the sense that they're either physics, right? The reality, when you're building something, you have the physical world that limits you. Software, you have bits and you're creating structures. An if-then statement will always function the same way, right? It's a one and a zero. But then you move into seeing government as a similar behavior of a predictable set of inputs will have a deterministic set of outputs, ignores the fact that people are just weird and idiosyncratic, and that there's other forces and things moving around in this that aren't subject to those types of predictive rules.

Franklin Foer: That, and they have so little respect for institutions because institutions are the embodiment of all those weird characteristics that you just described. The nature of human history is that these things accrete, whether they're government agencies or they're universities. If you were to rebuild them now, you would never rebuild them in the way that they've accreted over time because it is objectively irrational. But I think the mistake that engineers sometimes make is that they assume by destroying those old institutions, you would necessarily be able to replace them with something better, which is not always the case and it also ignores a lot of the wisdom that accretes slowly within the idiosyncratic practices and byways of an institution, that institutions have a hard time sometimes expressing their wisdom, but oftentimes it's there, and that the things that institutions preserve may be indeed antiquated by the standards of optimization, but they have enduring values as well.

Casey Dreier: That's like an Edmund Burkean kind of style of politics, right?

Franklin Foer: Exactly.

Casey Dreier: [inaudible 00:23:34] conservatism.

You have a long profile of Elon Musk in this piece. It kind of weaves between the role of SpaceX within NASA and NASA's shifting relationship to space to private companies and then also kind of an exploration of Musk's viewpoint and beliefs. The way that you framed it, the word that kind of kept coming into my head, and I'd be curious to hear your response, it was like this kind of Nietzschean Ubermensch kind of mentality being represented through Musk. But I think, without the aesthetic, there's a will to power through. It is almost like the framing of a Musk approach to the world, but without seeing the validity of highest expression being an artistic or aesthetic sense. And, again, apologies to the engineers who are listening to this, I don't think this is common, but there's like an over-engineering mindset, too focused in one style of approach without expressing some larger viewpoint. But do you see this as some kind of pure sense of will to power of how Elon Musk conceived himself vis-a-vis humanity much lesser or space at least?

Franklin Foer: Yeah, I think it's a little bit more romantic, even if he's not somebody you would describe as especially romantic, because it's the combination of this belief in apocalypse and impending doom, and that the vehicle for our impending doom is constantly shifting shape in his worldview, whether it's climate change or it's AI or nuclear war. He knows in his bones that humanity is going to come to some sort of catastrophic end, which requires salvation, and so he styles himself a messianic figure, which is not that surprising given the books that he grew up reading, which often featured an engineer who comes to the rescue of humanity.

Casey Dreier: It's basically Asimov's foundation books, right-

Franklin Foer: Exactly.

Casey Dreier: ... among others.

Franklin Foer: Exactly. So I think, for deeply psycho-biographical reasons, he craves playing that role himself. Once you've assigned yourself that role where the consequences and the necessity of playing that salvific role is so strong, it allows you to break many rules in pursuit of that important overwhelming objective.

Casey Dreier: It's interesting you describe him as romantic in that sense, because I've been going back and forth to you. He doesn't neatly fit within categories, I think. Through your piece too, you talk about how SpaceX, the company, is not some ideologically preferred thing. It is actually an incredible company, yet it is a truly unique contributor and player on the stage. Where I see the kind of will to power is being this no respect for establishment, breaking rules, taking on the ownership of through sheer will, the desire to create and manifest this future.

Franklin Foer: Exactly.

Casey Dreier: But then, you said the motivation is really interesting. Do you believe, again, through your work on him, that his motivation was always that from the beginning or has evolved into this more messianic-ish figure as time has gone on and he's become more successful?

Franklin Foer: I think it's evolved for reasons where... It's like very few people are born with a messianic mindset. You don't meet a whole lot of toddlers who are messianic, but you can see how it evolved over time, which was that he had... It was based on what he read, it was based on how he was raised, and it was based on these unmet urges for affirmation that he had. And then, when he starts to achieve some level of success, he begins to test the waters and do these more audacious things in the realm of space. And then he starts to receive adulatory press coverage because, on its face, it's pretty cool that this guy who made a lot of money is trying to do big, ambitious things where the government is so obviously floundering. And then the government starts to realize that, "Hey, maybe we should place some bets on this guy." So when the media and when the government is telling you, "Hey, you really could rescue our space program," and, "Hey, you really are doing something amazing," which he was, it's easy to see how that could inflate one's sense of mission. I think the thing that's so curious about the way that he thinks about space is how he seems to have some pretty big fixed ideas, but largely he's riffing. He's just kind of making it up as he goes along. "Hey, we're going to nuke the poles of Mars with..." These aren't things that are well-conceived scientific approaches to achieving his end goals. It's him spitballing on a stage with a reporter who's asking him questions. Part of his persona is also that he's a provocateur, that he enjoys throwing things out and seeing what kind of reaction that they're going to get. The fact that he may be belittled or dismissed, that doesn't really seem to bother him in any particular sort of way.

Casey Dreier: Did you ever uncover the post-success state of what a Mars colony and his vision would look like? I think this goes to my thinking of this, the Nietzschean without the role of the aesthetic. What is life like and what enriches life at this point? This kind of cuts into a deeper theme we've touched on. Through the action... As I said, we both grew up, and I particularly grew up reading these Sagan, but also back to Arthur C. Clarke, this idea that going into space is an enrichment to humanity. In Clarke's telling, it literally would help us transcend to a higher state of existence, and that seems to have changed.

You call it. You have a barn burner of a couple of paragraphs here. You said, "Elon Musk's values have come to dominate American aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old NASA mission where space was once a realm of cooperation beyond commercial interest in military pursuits. Now, it's the site of brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has been replaced by an obsession with rocket power."

Franklin Foer: Yes. The amazing thing about space is that it is this tabula rasa where we do have the potential to imagine a future that's better than the one that we had back here on this planet. But I think, with Musk, what separates him from that old lyricism is that he views space as an escape hatch, that space isn't this alternative option to human existence on planet earth. It is a place we need to go in order to hide and protect ourselves from the catastrophe that will eventually inevitably befall us here. Once you get in that mindset of escape, it's about survival. Survival is a very thin grim scenario for humanity. It's about hiding out. It's about avoiding the worst. It's not about fulfilling some sort of higher end.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: It's almost tautological in the sense that the point of colonization is to be somewhere, is to be alive, just to have humans somewhere else. Existence beyond that is irrelevant because... Or you are existing, therefore you've succeeded in your [inaudible 00:33:07].

Franklin Foer: It's also the difference between Musk and Bezos. I'm not a fanboy for Jeff Bezos either. But I do think that the O'Neill colonies, you look at the renderings of them, they at least suggest an existence that maybe it totally mimics a lot of what we have back on planet Earth.

Casey Dreier: They're Edenic.

Franklin Foer: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Right, like, "Here's your Eden, your endless paradise of plenty in space."

Franklin Foer: Yeah. I somehow have more time for an Edenic vision of space because it at least means that there's this possibility of doing better. That if we're going to set out to actually colonize something in space, which I consider to be an incredibly remote possibility and something that probably should not be a primary goal of the United States government in terms of its space priorities, but if we were going to pursue it, I would hope that there would be some possibility that it would be better than what we have now or at least would offer some hope for doing better.

Casey Dreier: I think I would say if Musk were to characterize his vision, he would say it would be better, that we're going to have some... Everyone will use X and they'll vote on things en masse whenever they need to pass a law or something and they'll use crypto or something. There is a strain of utopianism involved in this.

Franklin Foer: There's the libertarian utopianism.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Franklin Foer: But I think that so much of it... To go back to Kennedy and the frontier idea, I think that that is probably what floats his boat or what have you, whatever the space equivalent of that is.

Casey Dreier: Orbits his ship, yeah.

Franklin Foer: Yeah, that he believes that it will be exciting and that there will be this rush of adrenaline and that it is... This is the thing, as I'm talking this through and I'm now going to spitball like Elon Musk, I think he wants the thrill of exploration in the guise of colonization and that exploration is a great way to live your life, but it's not a permanent... If you're actually going to relocate humanity to another place, you can't live it in a way where you're constantly vulnerable. Nobody wants to... Living on the frontier is a hard existence. I think we should be grateful that the frontier closed and that we were able to locate into permanent settlements where we were able to take solace in community and able to build institutions.

Casey Dreier: Right. It's nice not having to worry about famine or not having a crop grow and then just whatever kind of hard... or laboring 17 hours a day to build a fence. It's interesting that you talk about this relationship of... You say the story of NASA and Elon Musk is a parable for government in the United States. Can you outline that a bit? And I'd like to follow up with just an addition to that.

Franklin Foer: As we've already discussed, Apollo was the embodiment of a technocratic liberalism that flourished for a time in this country that was the consensus about how we were going to tackle some of the hardest problems that we had in front of us. That promise of technocracy, the liberal technocracy, was an extremely expensive promise that was ultimately not sustainable. So the question is, "What comes in its wake?" In the realm of space, we decided it was the space shuttle, which was the epitome of a government program that satisfied nobody. It was kind of a half measure. It was not the full Wernher von Braun package about going to Mars and about all the wonderful things we could do in space. It was a program that had... We shouldn't fully degrade and diminish it, but it was a half measure and it did become a zombie program.

You could see the ways in which government was creating problems for itself that it then had to solve. So there was the space station, you needed to find some sort of way to service it. Rather than stepping back and maybe doing the engineering thing, which is really thinking hard about what our objectives are, which I think is maybe the primary question both for politicians and for engineers, it was just that we kept problem solving. And then you have a series of administrations that are scrambling and not really caring. That was the thing that I think is most distressing, is that you have politicians who go through the motions as it relates to space exploration, but they don't actually care about the outcome. That means that the priorities are continually shifting. It means that we're never fully funding whatever it is we're hoping to achieve. So you need to create Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to just keep the whole thing going.

The traditional defense contractors offered one set of Rube Goldberg contraptions, but they were so evidently insufficient and costly and bureaucratic that there became this quest to create a new Rube Goldberg contraption, which is what we've ended up with SpaceX. I think that the paradox is is that we don't care that much about human space exploration as a political system, as a culture, but we care a lot about space because space has only grown in importance because of its centrality to communications and its centrality to national defense. I think the precarious position we've put ourselves in is that the Rube Goldberg contraption that yielded SpaceX is now so much more important to these other objectives of communication and defense that whatever happens in the realm of space exploration is essentially irrelevant now because we're locked in when it comes to using the internet or surveilling or potentially missile defense. It's going to be very hard to escape this relationship or diversify.

Casey Dreier: Or just communication, as you point out, with the role of Starlink in the Russia and Ukraine war. I was thinking, as you were saying that, back in the '60s, space was the primary symbol or the dominant symbol of techno capability in a sense. That's no longer the case now because the technology and the whole obviously computing and communications revolution with the internet has provided alternative ways to represent that type of technological dominance or leadership or what have you. Space, it's a potent symbol, but I think the amount of dollars flowing around AI and just software in general, not to mention computing and chip making and all these other kind of key areas of technology, seemed to, in a sense, have diluted the ability, particularly human spaceflight, to serve that need. They wanted that [inaudible 00:40:16], that diminishment of government funding as well.

I always think about how... You read contemporary writing about Apollo and they say, "This is the future." I don't know if you read Of a Fire on the Moon while you were preparing for this. In kind of the fever dreams of his writing from that book, it was the organizational skill and the power of systems, and it was actually... He had it completely backwards. The systems itself ultimately became, as you said, these kind of sclerotic and ineffective organizations. The thing that no one seemed to see was that the little Apollo guidance computer was kind of what the future was going to be, right? The shrinking of compute power and the increasing ability of it was actually what was going to be the revolution coming forward that no one seemed to see. I wonder if human spaceflight is still kind of stuck in that pre-compute era of what symbolic capability and strength and frequency is.

Franklin Foer: It feels like part of the problem is that we've already done it. Space is a realm where we achieved mastery before anybody else, any other nation on the planet. If China manages to go to the moon before we go to the moon again, it doesn't really actually seem like that big of a deal.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, there's only one Sputnik moment almost by definition. And I think you're clearly right because that's about to happen, it seems like, in the next couple of years where China seems about to be ready to land on the moon and you don't see a rapid reconfiguration of all of this. There's no political freak out about it. It's about all these other newer technologies seemingly.

Franklin Foer: Right. Probably for better, but maybe a little bit for worse, we're not in a civilizational struggle with the Chinese. There's never going to be a president who's going to organize American political economy around the goal of going to the Mars before the Chinese for two reasons. One is, again, we just don't care enough about that struggle to be able to do that. Number two, I'm not sure we actually believe in ourselves enough to be able to believe that we would actually be able to do that in advance of the Chinese. I'm not sure we would make that kind of gamble that Kennedy was willing to make in 1961.

Casey Dreier: Well, from your framing of just the public's relationship to government, it's almost like the tool, it's not even the right tool by which to do so anymore. I think you correctly raised in your article, again, there are serious issues with the bureaucracy at the space program and the politics that limit it in various ways. Strangely enough, like what we're seeing here in the last few months, the White House is doubling down on the parts that seem to have the biggest problems and undermining and slashing the parts that actually work really well, like the science side, as we know no one else really does, certainly, the private sector doesn't do, a very symbolic representation of where the nation is, just not where I wish to see it applied in that sense.

Do you see this role of NASA encompassing the problems broadly that these kind of organizational systems have invited, in a sense, this challenge to it? How could we not want to see something better? It seems to be just reflective of our broader, at least political attitude in this country that people are just willing to wash these things away, this kind of anti-Burkean philosophy, in order to just try something better. You have SpaceX standing as an example of like, "Look how much better it can be?" at least on a superficial level.

Franklin Foer: Yeah, but one of the great tragedies is that... I had the privilege of being able to meet with a bunch of NASA employees, this was not through you, but it was through a different group, that would come to Washington to lobby their Congress people to try to preserve NASA. What was incredible about the people who work at NASA is their sense of mission that, while the political system doesn't have that same sense of mission about space, NASA employees do and they all firmly believe I think probably, correctly, that there's a job waiting for them in the private sector where they could get paid more money than they get paid working for the government, but they still believe in NASA as an organization.

I think the public still believes in NASA as an organization. You don't see people walking around with IRS or Social Security Administration T-shirts. Almost every day, you end up encountering somebody in an airport or somebody walking down the street who's got a NASA cap or T-shirt on. That's a pretty incredible achievement for the government that it created something like that that still has that association in the public's mind with something that they feel that they actually identify with, that they're actually willing to wear it as kind of their jersey as they go out there in the world, because that's the sports team that they support. I think squandering that is a tragedy unto itself because you should want incredibly inspired, competent people working for the United States government, but it's a tragedy in the larger sense that it feels like the government was able to build up this brand in this one area that it's now risking in an existential sort of way.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Well, and you bring up... The path to this point at NASA was paved by both Republican and Democratic administrations, with Obama administration in particular, being in a sense that the key point of SpaceX's history probably wouldn't exist without the Obama administration today. The one thing I think I didn't see as much in the article, Elon Musk is framed as this sui generis kind of individual. I think to a degree that he is particularly with space, but it's certainly coming out of a tradition, this expectation of commercialization that goes all the way back to, I'd say, particularly in the '80s during the Reagan era, but obviously, before that, this idea that government shouldn't be the only one operating in this domain.

There seems to be, at least in the American conception of it, a fundamental ideological belief that space needs to have private sector participants to fully take advantage of what's there. That doesn't always have to be for the transcendent reasons, but it could be that's the materialistic opportunities for the private sector there. It seems like though that that whole framing, particularly in the way that you framed it in the story, this whole ideology has kind of blown up in the face of the people who believe that because they wanted this to be part of the broader romantic ideal and, instead, it's actually diminishing the romantic ideal within the national system for... Let's say, at best, the idiosyncratic beliefs is one or two individuals who are now driving a lot of the direction of the space program.

Franklin Foer: Yeah, that's exactly right. It was tied up with a lot of the libertarian utopianism of going out into space that maybe part of the better future there would be a future without the shackles of government and not surprising that that would get transposed to the methodology that would be used to pursue that sort of goal. Of course, you're correct to point out that this isn't just a far-right libertarian fantasy. It's a very mainstream libertarian fantasy that the Obama administration not just succumbed to, but made the defining policy-

Casey Dreier: They fought for it real hard.

Franklin Foer: ... of the United States against a lot of hardcore Republicans who were on the other side of the aisle on those issues. We have to see this as a mixed bag that unleashing the market did work, in the sense that you were able to erect one corporation that was able to do some pretty amazing things relative to all the corporations that had come before it in pursuit of these goals. But on the other hand, it means that we have some really dangerous dependencies forming, that we don't actually have a pure commercial market. We have one vendor, the United States government and all of its manifestations, both defense and civilian, and we have one vendor that supplies that client with essential services. We just know that there is this problem when you're relying on one entity to do things that you really care about. You're making yourself theoretically vulnerable and practically vulnerable.

Casey Dreier: It's the sense that... The dream as action hasn't manifested in the commercialization, I would argue. It's not a healthy market, as you just identified. You had a great stat in your article, 95% of launches last year from the US were SpaceX and the other few were basically test flights. I don't think there's... maybe one Atlas V in there. That's been decommissioned, because at the moment, SpaceX has a functional de facto monopoly of access to space even with these new companies. They're building up their capacity, they can't compete on that. So there's not a marketplace for the government to purchase from, really. There's just the one provider, and that's not a successful commercialization strategy. You've actually just... In a sense, the intention failed, but it's also... I just keep going back to the fact that SpaceX... It's almost like SpaceX was never seen to... No one conceived of a single company being this good almost, or the opposite, that they assumed every company could be this good, right? And it turned-

Franklin Foer: Or isn't this just what happens with big tech, is that you have network effects that start to happen and that you have unicorn companies that come in and they're able to capture the network, they capture the market, whether it's Amazon or Meta or Google, and you're stuck with them until there's some sort of giant disruption, which may or may not ever happen.

Casey Dreier: Right. That's a great... I wanted to ask you because you've written about big tech. You've written a book about big tech a few years ago. There's obviously this relationship now. There seems to be a particularly fertile ground in Silicon Valley for the idea of space and space commercial and space activities, going all the way back to even just original, the fact that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both made their money from tech. What's your model of why that's the case? Why do you think Silicon Valley in particular seems to resonate so strongly with space? Is it this romantic ideal? Is it the potential for wealth? Is it something deeper? And then, as you said, it seems to be like the expression of these companies are really reflecting this new model as a consequence of that.

Franklin Foer: So we should not discount the commercial imperative and the desire to make wealth, but I think there's also a theological quality that space obviously always has, but that it's true for a lot of tech, whether it's the pursuit of the merger of human and machine. There's this desire to achieve transcendence through technological means where we become an evolved species. It's a deeply spiritual mission, and you see that in the way that a lot of the titans of tech talk about the role. It taps into a long, deep western tradition where technology, because it is so incredible and does reshape human life in extraordinary ways, opens up these dreams and pathways to some sort of transcendence through the further merger of man and machine.

Casey Dreier: Do you think there's also a relationship between the concept of limitless growth, that space is itself limitless, and the idea... That's kind of what drives a lot of these big tech ideas that, software, there's no inherent limit to how big you can get.

Franklin Foer: Right, no constraints, which is of course an understandable human fantasy because constraints suck. Just to go back to the Nietzschean quality of it all, it's kind of offers the possibility of an infinite power that's just there waiting to be grasped.

Casey Dreier: It's always healthy for a human brain to seek after infinite power. Another symbol, a symbolic aspect of the space program, that's emphasized in your piece that I have thought about quite a bit was this idea of the role of individualism versus collectivism or group ethos. That's another way to kind of trace this changing parable of government between this immediate post-war era when you suddenly had... Kennedy's torch has been passed to this new generation. Most of them had fought in World War II. It had been won on basically technology and organization and bureaucracy, effective bureaucracy.

For a while, it seemed like there was this broad high trust era in government, obviously not the case, and individualism now kind of driving this through, the fact that we talk about space through the guise of one or two people. I'll make it a meta commentary on your piece too that it was... Your piece itself focuses on an individual and almost as a way to provide the narrative. You can correct me as a person who works in media. I would guess that the role... Elon Musk had to be part of the story. If you had just pitched the story of NASA as a changing institution symbol, would that have gotten the same level? Would the magazine have picked this up? Would they have wanted you to run with this, or does it require, in a sense, this individual to connect with? That seems like there's a seductive, going back toward the beginning, a humanistic desire to see these things reflected through a person rather than an organization, which is more abstract.

Franklin Foer: Gosh, this requires some self-interrogation. I'm sure you're correct that having the individual hook is important, the way that we tell stories in our present day culture. It was true then as well, right? Wernher von Braun was on the cover of magazines standing in for-

Casey Dreier: He himself wasn't the focus of the discourse though. He promoted the idea, he was maybe a notable name or it's like Carl Sagan too, but the concepts and the ideas weren't focused on the individual. It wasn't what Carl Sagan thought about the future. It was Carl Sagan's vision for this inclusive future. I guess it's maybe a subtle distinction between it.

Franklin Foer: Yeah, right. A willingness to take on a collective venture is also hugely diminished in that the society is so much more zero-sum than it once was. All that's true, and I think it would only be surprising if that somehow didn't penetrate the way that we thought about space and science.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm. I wonder, do you think if this is also related to big tech, this is an expression of how our brains and media have changed from social media, that it's all about... Social media is, to me, the high school lunchroom invading every aspect of our existence in terms of gossip and focus and what's this person saying and this person's being a jerk and this person's being like preening for attention. It's all very individualistic focused, and that's the concept of a creator rather than an organization that provides you news and these individual relationships with podcasters or other places. I wonder if that's a function of how media landscape has changed as well, that we expect things to be related to the individual.

Franklin Foer: Definitely, definitely. Definitely that and it's also a reflection of the way in which our politics have changed, where... Like I said, the Cold War was a very helpful way of inducing that state of trust and collective mission where you have a big scary enemy that you're up against. You can get people to transcend themselves, to become participants in a communitarian system or a collective system or however you want to describe it, and we don't have that anymore.

Casey Dreier: If we don't have an individual either running amok or driving the force of the American space program, is it possible that it can connect anymore on a broader level? Do we now require an individual then to fixate on? I think we've seen the danger of weaknesses of individuals now replacing a policy consensus. They're much more interesting to follow, but they're idiosyncratic and weird sometimes and can change. They don't have, in a sense, the mitigating force of policy. But if we're unable to present a group effort or a collective effort or an organization, even a compelling way to the broader public that is required to enable this, is this just some inevitable endpoint that we'll always come back to?

Franklin Foer: Yeah. I had like to not think that that's the case, but you've already once turned me as a Burkean, but-

Casey Dreier: I just said that one conception was Burkean.

Franklin Foer: But I was going to say the thing about trust is that, once it's dissipated, is very hard to restore. Once the luster has been knocked off something, like government, we found it very, very hard to paint that luster back on. The forces of social media that you described only served to push us further apart from one another. It's just impossible to imagine any politician of any stripe making a big national commitment and everybody getting on board. I hope that we're going to be able to return to some culture where that's possible again because, otherwise, it's not just space that gets sacrificed, it's our ability to care for one another, to protect one another, to function in a way where we're not ripping each other to shreds constantly.

Casey Dreier: Franklin Foer, thank you for joining me today, really enjoyed speaking with you. Everyone, please read the piece. We'll link to it on the show notes. Hope to have you back sometime.

Franklin Foer: Oh, such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.

Casey Dreier: The Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society here in Pasadena, California and made possible by our members. Hopefully, you are one of them. You can join us at planetary.org/join if you're not.

Sarah Al-Ahmed is the producer and host of Planetary Radio, Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers, and Mat Kaplan is the host of our monthly Book Club Edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor, Merc Boyan, our visual storyteller and the composer of the Space Policy Edition theme. I'm Casey Dreier, your host of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Until next month. Ad astra.