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.

Thank you for joining me.

I'm very excited about my guest this month.

She has been on the show before, I think a couple of times.

I consider her one of the most insightful and thoughtful and interesting minds working in space policy today.

Of course, I'm talking about Dr. Bob Yilal.

She was the first associate administrator of the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy, an office she helped design. Prior to the first associate administrator of the Office of Technology Policy and Strategy,

an office she helped design.

Prior to that, she worked at the Science and Technology Policy Institute,

and she is now the professor of policy analysis at the Rand School of Public Policy.

She is here to talk about a new paper, a new report that she co-authored with Roger Myers on in-space nuclear power, called Weighing the Future, Strategic Options for U.S. space nuclear leadership.

This is a fascinating report that, unlike a lot of reports, actually says something and says something interesting and lays

out real pathways for after identifying a problem for in-space nuclear power, provides some

serious and very thoughtful paths forward and really reframe some of the questions about why we

need this. So the idea that power is not just an issue of propulsion,

which is how it's often framed, but that nuclear power is the thing about power, the enabling

aspect of literally everything you do in space. For those of you who are excited to watch

Apollo 13's 30th anniversary coming out this year. You may remember the role of

power in that movie of keeping the astronauts alive on the way back from the moon. It's pretty

much everything. There's not a lot of power in space, honestly. And for the longest time,

most spacecraft have had to work with not very much on the order of light bulbs or computers, home computers, but definitely nothing like the very high intensive power needs that will be required to enable things like industry, maybe advanced AI on spacecraft, processing,

...