NASA Admin on Russia Leaving the ISS & China’s Space Secrecy

BIANA GOLODRYGA: Well, political tensions on Earth between Russia, China, and the United States have spilled into space, with China currently assembling its own space station and Russia planning on doing the same. International cooperation in the thermosphere is deteriorating. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson talks to Walter Isaacson about the U.S. approach to space diplomacy and the spectacular findings of the James Webb telescope.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And administrators Bill Nelson, welcome back to the show.

BILL NELSON, NASA ADMINISTATOR: Thank you so much, Walter. It’s always a pleasure to be with you.

ISAACSON: So, the news this past week or two is how the Russians are continually saying, all right, they’re going to pull out of the International Space Station in the next few years, partly because of the situation in the Ukraine and the bad relation. What do you really think the status of that is?

NELSON: Well, of course, the United States government position and President Biden especially is that it is horrible what’s going on in Ukraine as a result of President Putin. But we’ve actually almost been through this drill before, and it goes back to the middle of the Soviet Union in the Cold War when in the midst of that hostile standoff of nuclear weapons, we found a peaceful connection with then the soviets, now the Russians, in the civilian space program. For in 1975, a soviet spacecraft rendezvoused and dived toward the American spacecraft, and the crews lived together in space. And that has continued all the way to this day where we built the International Space Station together starting in the late 90s, after us visiting the Russian Space Station, Mir. And today, that professional relationship, friendly relationship between cosmonauts and astronauts, it continues.

ISAACSON: We’ve got three Americans on the space station now and three Russians, and I think when Italian. So, you know, if you were listening to the show and you wanted to send a message about how this is still part of international cooperation, you know, what message is that?

NELSON: What I’ve been saying all along, even under the former regime. And that is, we both continue to act in a very professional and friendly manner in running the International Space Station. We, the United States, intend to keep the station going until 2030. Until we can then turn over to a commercially built space station, the low Earth orbit activities. So, that we, NASA, can concentrate our activities on the program on the moon, getting ready to go to Mars.

ISAACSON: One of the contracts you have with this potential new space station in 2030 is with Jeff Bezos. You have a contract with Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, to send American astronauts to the current space station and beyond. Are those the type of entities that will end up building commercial space stations that NASA will contract and use?

NELSON: Yes, and many others. There is a lot of commercial activity. Another company called Axiom is actually sending private astronauts to the space station now in order to acclimate them to the beginning of a commercial space station. So — but there are many other companies that are doing this. And the commercial program doesn’t stop at low Earth orbit. We have commercial landers going to the moon with NASA scientific payloads that we basically contract for their service, their lander, it’s much cheaper for us. But it’s information that we need, for example, we’ve got one that’s going next year that’s going to dig at the south pole to see if there’s water underneath. That’s our instrument digging. If there is water, there’s rocket fuel, hydrogen, and oxygen.

ISAACSON: You’re talking about the south pole of the moon?

NELSON: South pole of the moon, that’s correct.

ISAACSON: China is building its own space station. I think in the past couple of weeks they sent in a module up. Do you think we’re in a race with China or do you think you could do with China what your predecessors did in 1975 and say, let’s work together on space exploration?

NELSON: I wish we could, and Lord knows we’ve tried, but China has been crickets. They are very secretive. You saw that when they send a 23-ton empty rocket that is uncontrollable. It’s tumbling back to Earth, and they won’t share any data about where it’s going to land. They’ve done this twice now. Plus, you go back to 2007, they sent an anti-satellite rocket up, blew up an old satellite, put tens of thousands of pieces of space junk up, and threatened a lot of people’s satellites as well as the space station. They are very, very secretive.

ISAACSON: You’ve written, you said, we must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying it’s ours, stay out. That that’s going to be a problem if they get to the moon — back to the moon, I should say, first. What are we going to do about that? And why haven’t we signed the U.N. protocol about the commercialization of the moon?

NELSON: Well, for example — I mean, I could go on and on. China, just is unwilling to respond. So, the protocol that you’re talking about, I think you’ve got it a little miscommunication here. It’s called the Artemis Accords. It’s something that we started. It’s a set of principles that are common sense principles. 22 nations have signed up to it, most recently Saudi Arabia. And what the principles say is, our reasons for going to space our peaceful. When each other is in trouble, we will come to help each other. We’re going to have commonality of instruments so that if we got in trouble, we could exchange. We’re going to look to surfaces of celestial bodies, to your question, the moon, and for peaceful purposes that can be used by all. Now, do you remember what China has done with the Spratly Islands? Suddenly, they’ve taken them over. This is our new territory and you stay out. We don’t want that to happen on the moon.

ISAACSON: What could they do on the moon? Do you think they could, sort of, colonize it and use it for military purposes?

NELSON: I can tell you what they can do. They could go to the south pole of the moon where the resources are, and they could land and they’d say, this is our exclusive territory, you stay out. And we not going to let that happen. But that’s what I’ve said. I haven’t said they’re going to do it. I hope they can be talked out of it. But I’m certainly painting the scenario that that’s something that they could try because they’ve already done it. In other words, we don’t want the south pole or the moon to become the Spratly Islands.

ISAACSON: So, suppose we get to the south pole of the moon first, you know, in the next few years. You got a program to do that. What do we do when we get there?

NELSON: We make it open to all international participants, just like we’ve done with our International Space Station.

ISAACSON: You have a Space Launch System called the SLS, it’s part of the Artemis Program, and it’s pretty much is run by NASA rather than a pure commercial endeavor. You have contracts, like, with Boeing to do parts of it. It’s going, if I may say so, really badly. What’s the problem there?

NELSON: It’s not going badly at all. As a matter of fact, we’re going to launch on August 29th. It’s the first —

ISAACSON: But didn’t you have to pull back the Boeing rockets? And hasn’t it been at least a year or two behind schedule? Your predecessor said they should just shut it down.

NELSON: Well, it’s more than a year or two behind schedule, but so was the James Webb telescope. It was 10 years behind the original schedule, and look what it has done. Walter, all of this boils down. Space is hard. This is tough stuff. This is technical gee-whiz stuff. And so, to, we are going to launch the largest most powerful rocket ever. It’s the first test flight, No humans on board. We always tried to do that. And then two years later, we will launch the first crew to the moon. And then a year after that we will go into lunar orbit and rendezvous with a lander and we’ll go down, in late ’25, land and bring the crew home safely.

ISAACSON: That’s a pretty complex system for 2025 getting to the moon. It requires both the system, you’ve talked about, and then a rendezvous with, I think, a SpaceX-built lunar lander. Are you pretty confident that by 2025 we will do it?

NELSON: Yes, and there again is another example of sharing the exploration of space with commercial companies. And for example, on the first competition, we’re getting this lander at half the price. SpaceX won the competition. We are going to have another competition for a similar lander. And so, that we’ll two landers that we’ll be able to choose from as we are landing on the moon.

ISAACSON: You got reauthorized, congratulations, Sir, this past week or so, inside the CHIPS Act. Does that legislation give you what you wanted? And tell us what we all spent a lot of time focusing on production of microchips, that part of the act. Tell us what’s in that act that’s going to help NASA.

NELSON: When you say it that way, reauthorized, it sounded like I’ve been reborn, and I’m ready. NASA is in a new era. This is the golden era of space exploration. And yes, that law, memorializes in law such things as the space station all the way to 2030. A bunch of knits and knots, technical things that were needed. And if the NASA bill is attached to the competition bill, the competitiveness act, which is primarily aimed at us being competitive in the international arena, specifically with China, on so many things but not the least of which is chips. The silicon wafers of being able to have them produced here in the good old USA instead of in China.

ISAACSON: You know, China’s announced a whole lot of breakthroughs in quantum technology, including things that would be able to use satellites in space for encrypted telecommunications. Is that why you see the CHIPS Act and the NASA reauthorization and things going together? What are you worried about there?

NELSON: You answered your own questions. The short answer is yes. You, not only want to protect yourself from a manufacturer that may want to do you harm, from a defective chip. But you also want to make sure you have the available supply. Look what these small chips do to our economy. They’re in everything. They’re certainly in your cellphone. They’re certainly in your car. They’re in your refrigerator. Even your washing machine. So, it’s necessary to the American style of living, indeed the world’s style of living, in almost every day aspect of every moment of our waking lives. We want those chips manufactured here so that we have that available supply. And a secure supply.

ISAACSON: In some ways, it seems to me the most inspiring about space exploration is answering the really big questions. Like, how did this universe begin? So, tell us, what are you learning from the James Webb telescope? And how does that justify us going into this space?

NELSON: Well, there’s always this quest that we have to try to understand. Who we are, where we are, what are we in this vast cosmos known as the universe? Now, we have a telescope that is so perfectly designed with such precision, that we can look back and have already looked back, over 13 billion years ago. It will go back as far as 13 and a half billion years. And we know that the universe is 13.8 billion years ago when it all began. What we are learning, just think of the enormous distances. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That light that we have captured in this telescope has been traveling for 13.1 billion years and it will go back to 13.5. Now, that’s enough to blow your mind right there. But with the precision of the telescope, we are seeing how it formed. The first gases, the first dust clouds, the swirling that occurred that, eventually, things start forming, and then they start bumping and crashing into each other and start forming objects and the galaxy, and then this galaxy is crashing into that galaxy. I just saw a picture yesterday, it’ll be public very soon, of a galaxy that has been hit by another galaxy and how it looks after that galaxy. Many, many, many millions of light years away. So, these are some of the things that we’re going to learn. But we’re going to learn things that we don’t even know what questions are. That’s how exciting this whole thing is.

ISAACSON: Administrator Bill Nelson, thank you so much for joining us.

NELSON: Thanks, Walter.