A LightSail 2 Update This Week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome, I'm Kaplan of the Planetary Society,

with more of the human adventure across our

solar system and beyond. The Planetary Society's second solar sail has passed another

big milestone on its way to space.

We'll hear from Bill Nye and others on the team including Bruce Betts.

Bruce will also grace us with his usual what's up, sublime silliness.

We begin with Casey Der the society's director of

space policy Casey the Trump administration has just issued its at least

preliminary budget 62 pages and of that two pages reserved for

NASA how does it look well Matt that's right we talk about the president's

budget request as kicking off the usual budget cycle here in the United States.

This is a preview of that.

It's not the full budget that will come out later this year.

It takes a long time to put those together and they just haven't had the time yet but this tells us where they're

going and big picture what they're going to do is take 54 billion dollars from

the part of government that basically doesn't do defense and move that to the

Defense Department and that means a lot of federal agencies have to take a lot of cuts to make

that math work out so we were pretty nervous about what NASA would look like

and lo and behold,

NASA did pretty well.

I was surprised.

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