Walking the Halls of Congress
For the second time, I was granted the opportunity to attend as an honored volunteer at The Planetary Society’s (TPS) Day of Action (DofA). The first DofA I attended in September 2023 was a day of advocacy focused on supporting a range of exciting planetary missions, including the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. This DofA was about the bigger picture of the importance of space science, with a lot more urgency and a plan of action.
First, recognition to the team of TPS including Casey Dreir, Chief of Space Policy, Jack Kiraly, Director of Government Relations, Sarah Al-Ahmed, the Planetary Radio host, and Robin Young, Donor Relations Manager (and so much more), must be made! The members of the TPS staff essentially have the ability to each do the jobs of at least three people, so my presence can be akin to an emotional support animal in the worst of cases - but a valued member of the team in the best cases. My time with TPS always ranks in the best of cases, and that’s the damn truth.
Aside from my propensity to sing TPS’s praises, I actually learn quite a lot every time I’m given the opportunity to volunteer like this. The DofA that took place April 29, 2024 centered around advocacy for a bigger budget for NASA - to the tune of 9 billion dollars. A letter, “led by Representative Glenn Ivey (D-Maryland) and Planetary Science Caucus Co-Chairs Judy Chu (D-California) and Don Bacon (R-Nebraska),” was put out just the week before requesting this budget increase, and Jack and Casey were quick to make sure DofA helped find the signatories for it with the help of the dedicated members of TPS. Recently, cuts were made that dropped the NASA science budget by over a billion dollars, which also caused a mass layoff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and other NASA centers. The job loss was done not for a lack of interest by JPL and others to continue exploring the Universe, but because of decisions to slash NASA's budget.
While 9 billion dollars seems like a crazy number to the average citizen, it’s always important to note that NASA is taking up less than a half of a percent of the entire federal budget. Additionally, the NASA science program tends to come in at about 1% under budget consistently.
We’re often asked: why do we need to spend money on space exploration? There’s a few layers to this answer, and I’ll try to keep it simple. First up: remaining a leader in technological advancement. Just on May 3, China launched a rocket to the far side of the moon to collect rock samples – no one has ever done this, and now they’re the first. Americans are pretty well known for being competitive, so I’m sure that strikes a cord with some of us. They’ve also been pretty vocal that if we don’t accomplish the sample return from Mars by 2030 – they will. So all the money we spent sending the rovers and collecting this data will be for naught if we don’t finish what we started.
Second, NASA technology happens to be responsible for a lot of our everyday comforts and innovations in society in general. Every time we go out into space, we learn a little more about Earth. More efforts for the sustainability of our planet should be rolled into the initiatives of space exploration because if anything was going to figure out some of these issues - it’s that. I learned over this weekend that we learned about climate change by studying Venus, which seems relevant to this topic.
Lastly, a strong U.S. space program strengthens our international relationships. The European Space Agency (ESA) has bolstered their own space program by about 10%, holding up their end of the bargain for the MSR and an ambitious space science program that includes missions to Venus and to investigate gravitational waves. How does it look for us to not do what we said and allow our competition to collect our samples with our own alliances ready and willing to do their part? I could leave this rhetorical but I’ll come right out and say it - it ain’t good.
It wasn’t all bad news in these meetings, though, as we weren’t just discussing problems without trying to create solutions. Some of the more promising solutions were improving collaboration between robotic and crewed space exploration programs, like MSR and Artemis respectively, and asking for much clearer parameters from the government on their expectations of these projects. It seems to be a real catch-22; there’s no plan to recover because they want to know the budget and timeline, but NASA scientists can’t come up with a budget and the timeline without knowing Congress plans to support it. Administrator Nelson was on the Hill at the same time as us, advocating for support for NASA in the current budget cycle. It's a tough time for science, but the community is standing together with significant support in Congress.
As far as TPS’s own efforts are concerned, we started the day of advocacy with 18 signatories on the letter, and by the end of it, we had 44. That’s around 10% of the House, and that’s a big deal. As for what happens next, Jack himself told me, “The letter [has been] submitted to the House Appropriations Committee, which now undertakes the unenviable task of balancing the books in their own budget proposal. They first need to know how much money each category gets (for NASA, that's Commerce, Justice, Science). That happens this week. They then spend the next two months working out the details.”
I don’t only learn about the task at hand when I’m with TPS. Walking the halls of Congress for the first time in my life, I noticed why it is important to have members of the House that are representative of our country as a whole. For every congress member’s office I walked into, their staff was a direct reflection of themselves, albeit younger. The only places I saw people of color in office were when their congressperson was also a person of color. So please, remember to vote at even the smaller elections if you’d like to see more of the house of representatives become reflective of our country’s demographics.
Time will tell for all of these points as we approach another Presidential election, but here’s hoping our country votes in the best interest of everyone, and not just a select few.
