Welcome to a special conversation affiliated with Planetary Radio, but really there was so much to talk about regarding the NASA budget plans for fiscal year 2015 that we decided to have a special conversation with Casey Dreyer. Casey who is the

Director of Advocacy, a very effective one I might say for the Planetary Society,

and we are speaking Casey not long after a press briefing and the

revelation of a lot of documents about this budget by by NASA and that press

briefing starred

who else the NASA administrator Charlie Bolden first of all welcome

thanks met it's good to be on a special episode of planetary radio

yeah we haven't really done this kind of thing before. So folks out there,

listeners, please do let us know what you think of a special report like this.

It was so interesting that it started with the administrator, Charlie Bolden, sort of addressing the geopolitical

situation and he was saying yes we're funding these things that are going to help us stop depending on Russia and nobody mentioned

the Ukraine but I think it was I think it was implied.

Yeah well it certainly becomes suddenly much more clarified and important that we are depending on

Russia to launch all American astronauts into space at the moment.

And so far it's been working great, but no one really planned on Russia going into Crimea and kind of causing all this trouble with the Ukraine.

And it does, again, really crystallize that when you have other countries launching your astronauts you depend on good relations with those other countries

Bolden did make sure to clarify and I should note that we're recording this on Tuesday March 4th so this could be entirely out of date in a couple days.

It's moving faster.

But NASA Administrator Bolden did clarify and he stated that nothing in their relationship has changed.

And that actually, you know, it made me, reminded me is that this is one of the great advantages

of the space program is that even when you have larger geopolitical standoff, and this goes back to the Soviet Union,

space unites people and unites nations.

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