Hello and welcome to the space Policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society.

Good to be here this month.

I am very excited about our guest, Dr. Janet Vertessi, Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University,

who for the last two decades has studied not just NASA's robotic spacecraft, but the teams

that enable them. She's embedded herself and watched the various sociological engagements and interactions

and what makes these teams tick as they explore the solar system via their robotic emissaries,

in a sense. Her insights on teamwork and how knowledge is passed forward is reflected in two books that she's

written. The first was called Seeing Like a Rover, how robots, teams, and images craft

knowledge of Mars. And her latest book that came out a few years ago, shaping science,

organizations, decisions, and culture on NASA's

teams. They are truly unique resources in terms of understanding, in a sense, how the actual

process of exploration occurs with robotic scientific spacecraft. It's truly fascinating. But that's not even the exact

reason she's on the show this month. That's part of it. Why she's here is a op-ed that she

published recently that is linked to in our show notes. It's called invigorating the American

space sector requires working with

NASA, not against it. The period in which I'm recording this is a period of incredible uncertainty

for NASA itself, what its future is going to be, what its budgets are going to look like,

and how many people it will even have. At this point, again, in April of 2025, NASA narrowly

avoided laying off over 1,000 workers called probationary, which were basically young,

early career individuals and people who had just been promoted. NASA has, though, lost

nearly 5% of its workforce through voluntary buyouts

...