Space Policy Edition: What does “science as a service” really mean?

Casey Dreier (0:20)

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. And this is the show that goes into the processes and policies behind space exploration.

This month, joining me is my colleague, the Chief of Advocacy at The Planetary Society, Jack Kiraly, and a planetary scientist, astrobiologist, and board member of The Planetary Society working scientist, Dr. Britney Schmidt. Both of them are here to talk about the idea of SAS, Science as a Service.

This concept was formalized in the recent years by Jared Isaacman's leaked Athena document for NASA, promoting the idea of using science as a service, purchasing scientific data products, perhaps activities primarily for Earth science data. NASA has since followed up with an RFI, what's called a Request for Information from industry about ways that commercial industry could provide scientific capabilities for Earth science, heliophysics, astronomy. It's an open discussion and it's actually the continuation of a nearly four decade long effort to find ways for commercial entities to offset the costs of scientific data in space. Going all the way back to the 1980s with the Landsat debacle of briefly privatizing and un-privatizing Earth observation data from the Landsat satellites, ongoing efforts to purchase block amounts of data from Earth observing companies to varying degrees of success, and then seeing where else that could apply.

Obviously, NASA is in the midst of a variety of commercial experiments. Launch paying off particularly handsomely, at least at the moment. Eclipse the Commercial Lunar Payload Services CLPS program. Open question, but getting a significant increase in investment, as NASA now is intending to build out a moon base.

And as we'll find, commercial means a variety of different things to different people. So we will explain and explore this idea of science as a service, both from the perspective of policy and from a working scientist, a working planetary scientist and Dr. Britney Schmidt. Really interesting conversation, I recommend you stick around for that one. But before we get to that, I'd be remiss if I did not mention that this show, the Space Policy Edition, is a product of the Planetary Society, which is a non-profit organization, member-supported organization. We do not have government money, thankfully, right now, makes things a lot easier for us to say what we believe. We do not have significant corporate money. We are funded by individuals. Anyone can be a member around the world. And if you're not, please consider joining us. It's only four bucks a month. We haven't raised our prices in, I think, over a decade. That's a pretty good deal these days. Can you even get a cup of coffee? Maybe in a few places for $4 a month. Four bucks a month starting. If you're already a member, first, thank you. Honestly, your membership enables us to do this work, this show and all the other great work that we do in the Policy and Advocacy Program at the Planetary Society. So consider upgrading your membership. There are higher levels to support us more, or you can just give us a donation at planetary.org/join or planetary.org/donate. Please consider it. This is an effort we do because of you, literally. So thank you. And now, my conversation with Dr. Britney Schmidt and Jack Kiraly.

Britney and Jack, welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

Jack Kiraly (4:09)

Thanks for having us, Casey.

Casey Dreier (4:11)

Yes, indeed. It's a rare two-guest episode, but we have something off to admit that we are actually working through together, which makes it a perfect podcast episode, which is the idea of science as a service, and a topic that is quite relevant these days. Jack, do you want to just give us a heads up of why this phrase has entered our vernacular and what's kind of been going on with this idea?

Jack Kiraly (4:35)

Yeah, so science as a service means a million things to a million different people. NASA itself, it seems, is working through what exactly this program could mean going forward. There's been a number of different experiments in this science as a service, or really space access and space exploration as a service over the years. I think most recently we have the CLPS program, Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which these are the astrobotics Peregrine lander, Firefly's Blue Ghost. This program is going through a transformation from CLPS 1.0, which is the smaller lander systems that NASA has built out a number of missions planned for the next few years and moving into CLPS 2.0, which is going to be described as larger missions, more payloads, more payload space, more power capacity, all building up towards supporting future Artemis missions, connecting in with the Moon-based program, and this is built off of a long legacy of a trend towards commercialization for a number of different activities that the agency goes through, and in the hopes of creating marketplaces for companies to develop technologies and provide these services to the government with the idea that the more companies you have doing this, the more technology development that happens, the lower the cost to the government. And this really dates back to the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act that kind of set in motion the somewhat robust commercial launch sector that we have today with a number of different players, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, Boeing, United Launch Alliance, all vying for government and commercial and international contracts to get payloads into space. But we see other programs, the Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program, within Earth Science, buying data from companies like Black Sky, Maxar, and using that data for Earth science applications. So there's a number of different experiments that NASA and the US government as a whole have initiated, all built on this kind of central idea that if you can develop the commercial capabilities, the commercial marketplace, it will allow you to access areas of space, collect data, and do activities in space for a cheaper, overall cheaper cost because it's commercially available.