Space Policy Edition: What's going on with commercial space stations?

**Casey Dreier** (0:19)
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, welcoming you to another episode that explores the politics and processes behind space exploration. This month, we look at commercial space stations, commercial Leo development, or at least the promise of, the plans for, the hopes of that are currently going through, let's say, some turbulence, though those seem to have smoothed out by the time we have released this. NASA, looking at the post-international space station future. What takes its place? To talk about this with me, I welcome Clayton Swope. He's the Deputy Director of the Aerospace Security Project and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC., former congressional staff member, General Space Expert, who has written on this topic and a bunch of other topics. And he will give me kind of the generally pro-version of commercial space station development. I come at this a bit more skeptical. There are numerous reports that show the lack of an existing commercial or market interest in human-tended space stations. There are major questions about the feasibility, financial stability, capability of commercial space stations and whether they can or will work. Nonetheless, NASA and the US government are dumping in decent amounts of money, hundreds of millions, to support at the moment two companies, potentially more, in creating a post-ISS future.
But even NASA itself seems to be having second thoughts. At its Ignite event earlier this year, the head of the space station program, Dana Weigel, said some things that are relatively rare for a NASA official, saying that the commercial impact of the space station is limited, that there is no real viable budget level that NASA can support to enable multiple independent commercial stations in time for the end of the ISS, just a few years away, and proposing a radically different idea of extending the ISS, building out a commercial module that commercial stations could attach to.
That idea died within about a month of that proposal, but nonetheless, it's very instructive that there are some serious second thoughts about the viability of this program. I'm also a skeptic on the idea of the what's called continuous heartbeat policy, that the United States needs to maintain continuous occupation of low-earth orbit to some degree, for reasons that Clayton will try to convince me of, and other people may still yet. But that drives a lot of the higher level and more challenging requirements about having to continue to maintain a relatively expensive low-earth orbit program for astronauts while we're going to the moon.
So I'll bring my skepticism, my open-minded skepticism to this discussion. But before we get there, I'd like to remind you that this show and the Planetary Society itself that enables it is member supported. So if you like the show, if you like what we do at the Planetary Society, please, please consider joining us at planetary.org/join. Literally without you, we cannot do the show. We cannot do our great work here in educating and getting people excited about space, about promoting a science-driven approach to space exploration, doing policy, advocacy, all the incredibly important things that we need to be doing right now to support a space program that answers to and is responsible to and serves value to the broad public. That's planetary.org/join to join us. If you remember already, thank you so much. If you donated, consider donating again. planetary.org/join. And now, Clayton's vote.
Clayton, thanks for joining me this month on Space Policy Edition.

**Clayton Swope** (4:34)
Sure, Casey, thanks for the invite.

**Casey Dreier** (4:36)
One of the reasons I wanted to have you was this interesting drama that we just went through. You characterize it as a Greek tragedy, but hopefully a comedic one of the commercial Leo destinations program, commercial space stations program at NASA. You cover lots of other things, but this was, I thought you had a great piece about this on your CSIS website that we'll link to in the show notes.
But very briefly, why don't you catch us up to speed about what were you writing about, what just happened? And I think we even have some very recent updates as we're recording this, but that puts a little cap on the story and we'll go from there.

**Clayton Swope** (5:11)
Yeah, I think if you go back to the start of this saga, I go back to 2019 when NASA rolled out a commercial LEO development strategy, and the idea here was looking over the horizon to when we wouldn't have the International Space Station anymore, what comes next?
So at this stage or at that stage, the idea was that there would probably be some opportunity to use a service, a commercial service, a station in some shape or form, that would be operated by a company NASA could buy a service from. Maybe not initially, but maybe down the road, NASA wouldn't be the only customer, it would be one of many. But at that point, 2019, there was a recognition that NASA was probably going to be an important customer for whatever commercially operated station existed. So strategy was laid out, how they would get there. That included concepts like free-flying space station, so that is like the International Space Station. Then other ones that maybe weren't free-flying, they maybe started out attached to the International Space Station. Then eventually this transition to something that we knew as CLD.