The cost of shrinking space science

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Time Markers

00:00 – Episode introduction00:25 – Guest Introduction02:23 – Internal Decisions on Science Missions04:35 – A Paradigm Shift to Commercial06:44 – Surprise Firing – Closing of the Office of the Chief Scientist10:42 – Free Agents in STEM12:14 – Congress – Power of the Purse16:00 – What Drove you to this Career?18:01 – Space Takes – Satellite Refueling25:52 – Space Takes – Venus Venera Spacecraft27:54 – Space Takes – Rocket Lab Neutron Rocket

Transcript – Mamta Patel Nagaraja Conversation

David Ariosto – Mamta, it is a pleasure to have you on the show, especially now in regard to all of these historic proposed cuts to NASA, especially when it comes to NASA science, so you were sort of an early casualty in a lot of this. You worked as NASA’s Associate Chief Scientist for exploration and applied research. I told you before the show I wasn’t going to give your title, but now here I just did. But tell me what that means. Tell me what you actually did at NASA.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Sure. Yeah. So this is one of those roles that you definitely take as you have established some experience in the agency, and then you get to a point where you can serve an advisory role. So we were the administrators independent science team, and I say independent, because there’s the team that actually does the science and funds the science. They’re the ones who come up with the missions, or the mission the areas they need to get missions, and then they go out and put out the funding to get those missions, and they have a vested interest, monetarily and otherwise, in those missions.

We are a group of scientists who spent many years in those organizations but left to try to fulfill a different role the agency needed. In this case, it was to advise the administrator when, let’s say they’re tough decisions being made. For example, let’s say there is a big budget cut, and the administrator needs to figure out, well, which missions am I going to get rid of? They’re all important. They all serve the NASA mission that the overall mission. So he would come to our office and say, I really need to know what the pros and cons are of the missions and which ones are, are the ones that we need to consider for cutting and so we would come in, we don’t have any stake in the game, because we don’t fund any of the missions in that particular office, and we come in with our science hat on only, and we give them the pros and cons of the various missions that he’s looking for, and then let him make the ultimate decision of what’s going to be cut along with his science leadership.

David Ariosto – Give me an example of that, because I think, you know, the general public has, I think, has the general sense of what NASA does. And from the science side, I mean, they look at the International Space Station, they look at James Webb and they get a sense of some of the particularly the imagery that comes out of that. But I think, more broadly speaking, the nature of the agency. Agency has sort of like shifted in mind in different ways over the years, and yet now seems very, very different. So I’m wondering if you can kind of give us a little bit of a little bit of a context in terms of those internal decisions that were happening before we got to get, kind of get to the current state.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Yeah, and you know when, while I was serving which that was my last role, and I was only in it for a couple of years, so I didn’t actually have to make that tough display of information for the administrator. We didn’t actually have to cut while I was there, but I’ll give you a similar example and what was prioritization. And we did actually have to go through this. So we got into a position on the International Space Station where the time that the crew had to work on actual science was becoming really full. I mean, the amount of science being done on the space station is incredible at this time, and it got to the point where we had much more science than we had crew hours and other resources for and so the ISS team reached out to us and said, We really need some help at the agency level, up at the top, and going through this prioritization and understanding whose needs are what, and How do we prioritize that when everyone’s needs are important? And the two big players on the space station are this biological and physical sciences team and the the Human Research Program, but then there’s a bunch of smaller ones that are very important in space manufacturing. Is the one that I was a big proponent of. I. Because, yeah, I mean, there’s so much value, and it’s a very small investment. So just being able to prioritize those hours so that all of the science gets done, but you leave enough room, or, I should say, most of the signs, you have to prioritize which signs, but you leave enough room to fill in the gaps with what’s coming next. What should we be looking at? And so we went through this whole scheme of trying to help the agency prioritize with the space station.

David Ariosto – I think in that context, I think this is where I find this so fascinating, because your role essentially, particularly when it comes to the International Space Station, all the science that happens there is almost emblematic of a kind of a broader paradigm shift that the agency is facing altogether, in the sense that the ISS is retiring, you have all these commercial space stations that are coming on orbit. But there are different questions that are asked of commercial space stations relative to international the International Space Station, not least of which are financial considerations. Because, you know, from the folks that I’ve talked to, very a lot of people are very excited about this in terms of Pharmaceutical Research and all these other things that that have existing markets back on Earth. And yet ISS could prioritize things, perhaps through your office, that didn’t necessarily have that that immediate financial bottom line, but were valuable for the sake of science itself. Just explain is that, is that accurate? Is that a fair framing? First of all.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – I think it’s a fair framing, sure.

David Ariosto – So like, what does that represent, then, as we start to push into this, this commercial age, and maybe push away a little bit from from a top down approach that we’ve seen thus far.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Yeah, you mean how, like, how, what is the future of commercial space?

David Ariosto – I guess, like, when decisions start coming out of the hands of those at NASA and into the hands of those and NASA is being made more of a client than an architect, necessarily, within, within the kind of broader structure of the Persian space economy like that seems different.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Absolutely. Yeah. So those were some of the conversations. Our office also helped the ISS program in terms of transitioning into more of a client perspective than the one driving right. We no longer in the future when we have these commercial space stations. We no longer are the one who have made the investment. Now we’re working with teams who have made their own investment and trying to become a customer of theirs. Yeah, so we did spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that looks like. We put out a strategy the agency did. I’m now that I’m out of the agency. I’m having a hard time separating from the word we I no longer and with NASA…

David Ariosto – We should, we should get right into that, because, like that, that’s actually something that I want to kind of get to in a little bit more granular detail. Tell me. Tell me about that day, or sort of the moment that you learned that that you were out of a job.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Yeah, it was a surprise. It was March 10. I guess That day will never exit my memory only because, gosh, David, I am that little girl who grew up in a small town out in West Texas and dreamed big, right? This was in the era of the 1980s the Space Shuttle was at its oh, gosh, it’s magical beginnings, almost, and it had captured this entire generation of people just like me who could not wait to rocket into space. It was such a transformative period in space flight, and I was a little kid in that era, and so I grew up thinking, I’m going to fly on that rocket one day. And that was my passion, and that was what drove me, this little girl, first generation American immigrant parents, sort of that my parents came here because in India, I would have never had that opportunity. And I was going to make good, dang it. I was going to make good on the sacrifices that they had had made to give me this opportunity. So that was sort of the beginning. So for me, this was never a job. For many of us who get to NASA, it was never a job.

You know, all the so many kids dream of the skies, most of us outgrow that, and a very small portion of us become obsessed with it. And I was in that small portion made it made my way to NASA. So for that day to come, it was unexpected. We had, you know, if, I mean, we’re living it right now. This was three months at that time, it had been about a month of wild change trans I mean, no matter which side of the aisle you sit on, it is transformative. Whatever is happening right now is absolutely transforming our nation and our foothold in science and technology from my perspective. So it was, we were already kind of wondering, you know, how are they going to do this? Are they going to cut us? There was lots of rumblings coming into that day, but certainly I didn’t think I was walking into a meeting where they said, you’re no longer going to be a NASA employee.

But it was, I mean, as soon as we came in, we got an invite that morning on our calendar. We did not know ahead of time that it was coming. There wasn’t much context to it. You couldn’t see the people that had been invited to it. We thought it was our boss, the chief scientist, who was going to tell us perhaps what she thought the future of the office was going to be. That’s really what we thought it was going to be. But instead, it was the, you know, one of the top persons in HR, one of the top ranking members of the administrators team. We had no administrator at that time. Still don’t. So it was one of the higher ranking officials. And it was pretty quick, David, they said. What they told us was, where we have large scale reductions in force planned, and you are part of that, right? I no longer one. I wonder now, are we going to have large scale reductions? I hope not. I’m not one of those people who got let go that hopes, oh, man, I hope they get rid of a lot more. I mean, I hope they don’t. I believe in the mission of the agency, even though, in the end, it wasn’t my it’s not the ending I would have written for myself. I believe in the mission, and I believe in space flight. I hope to contribute to it from the other side now, but I hope that the agency, oh, go ahead.

David Ariosto – I highly doubt that that is the end of your story when it comes to space flight. The way I actually became aware of you was through LinkedIn, and I think you would post a photo of your head down in front of a NASA sign. And you know that there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of folks that are going through someone, something somewhat similar. I think there’s another question, though, that comes out of this, in the sense that is there a sense that scientists at NASA and those who have been let go, that they’re entering the free market now in a way that we just haven’t seen before? And I wonder what that what that means in sort of the broader context of the commercial sector, what means in the broader context of potential international competition. You know, you just have a lot of people with very deep knowledge that are that are now sort of free agents in this, in this emerging new economy.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – I love this idea of free agents in STEM it’s kind of cool, especially from the sports side of me. I love sports also. Yeah, I think that’s exactly what you’re going to see from NASA. Not so much, because the number of scientists let go from NASA is very small. There were two of us in the Office of the Chief Scientist who were science in scientific roles. But you know, if we look at the President’s budget, at least what was leaked the if Congress holds to the PBR, which they haven’t in the past, necessarily, then I do think you’re going to have this onslaught of really well versed, deep knowledge base of scientists coming onto the market. You are seeing it in human in Public Health from HHS, but from NASA…

David Ariosto – Bigger point though. I mean, in the context that you know, the power of the purse is, is, is held within the legislative branch, kind of in a little bit of a new era here, in terms of where the power dynamics are actually playing out. So I think that’s a question mark. There’s a question of, of a pivot that we saw in that skinny budget with SLS and Orion being phased out. And, you know, I and you saw a lot, and during those those Jerry guys make hearings, you saw a lot of pushback from those like Senator Ted Cruz. So, you know, there seems to be a lot happening now politically behind the scenes, in terms of the to and fro, the political hot potato that kind of gets tossed around when anytime budget conversations come up with NASA, which is not new, but this does feel new in the context of cuts and the nature of what that means long term. And I wonder if you can address because there are some that say that, and there’s a question Marc here, and I think that maybe there’s a legitimate question to be asked in the context of NASA for for years and years, has operated with with large budgets, some of which are practical, have practical applications, some of which are based more on exploration. But you know, for those champions of this decision, they might say, well, you know, is that really the best use of taxpayer dollars? And I wonder how you you would respond to something like that

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Yeah, so my, one of my favorite things that I’ve learned over my two decades plus at NASA is how much of our technology comes right back to people, how much of it really comes back to benefit here on Earth. And I think what we have to think about is, when you are trying to solve a problem that is so different than the problems we have on Earth, you have to innovate because the answer doesn’t exist. You have to develop technologies that do not exist. And then the question is, how do those. Technologies come back to us. So I’ll give you one that’s rooted in in the early space era, but it’s something that most of us can really relate to, and it’s one that I learned when I did a talk at the NIH while I was still with the agency, and I’d done some research on what type of technologies have come back to health.

And that’s how I learned about this one when NASA first was incepted, and they were flying the first men into space. They had put out a call and said, American companies, we need a way to figure out how to get basic vital signs from the astronauts, blood pressure, heart rate, things like that that didn’t exist. If you were in a hospital and you needed vital signs taken, then the doctor had to come to you to take those vital signs, or the nurse and the medical staff. And so they said, we don’t just need it in the hospital. We need it from Earth into space. And so a company, two gentlemen, came and said, We can do that for you, and developed a way to get those vital signs from space down to earth. But the more miraculous thing is, then they said, Wait, if we can do it from space to Earth, can’t we do it from the nurses station to the hospital room? And that is how we have vital sign monitors and hospitals. They went to the LA hospitals and said, Look, we just developed this for the government. We think we can do it for your hospital, and the L, the hospitals in LA said, Okay, let’s give it a go, and that is how you end up with those monitors hooked up to you, and the nurses no longer have to come to you. But if something happens, if your heart stops, they get notified at the nurses station because of this technology, and it was all because our government invested in solving a problem that required, that was required for the space program, but could come back to benefit us here on Earth. It’s pretty good answer.

David Ariosto – Pretty good answer. You know, of invention here, last question here, last question before we wrap this up, why were you one of these little girls, young women, now, full adults, who never stops, sort of looking at the stars. Why didn’t you transition? Because your your family was not like you. You came from a family of astronauts here. I mean, what? What drove you?

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – What drove me? The unknown, exploring what lies that you can’t see and that what we don’t already know. I think that. I think it still drives me today. David, just being able to learn more and discover more and answer questions that we don’t already have answers to. I don’t know, I feel so fun, and I see it in my kids too. I now have the privilege of being a parent to three kids, and I can see that curiosity in them too, the same curiosity I used to have. I don’t know if it’s genetic or if it’s environmental, probably a combination, says the scientist in me, a combination of who you’re around and what you’re around and who you are on the inside. But there’s something so motivating about asking questions that no one else has ever asked before, and then going and finding the answer in a methodical way. I love the scientific method or the engineering design process, one of my favorite things.

David Ariosto – I mean, the sense of exploration. There are always some kids that just have to leave their hometown.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Yes, that’s the best way to put it. You know, I loved my hometown, but I always had this yearning to leave and go find what else was out there. What was it like to live in a bigger city? What was it like to live in a different state? What if I changed regions and I that’s so funny you say it that way, because that’s exactly how you can track my life.

David Ariosto – All right. Well, you know, you toss it back today is a good way to wrap this up. So Dr. Mamta Patel Nagaraja, former NASA Associate Chief Scientist for exploration and applied research. It was an absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Mamta Patel Nagaraja – Same Likewise. Thank you so much, David, for having me.