Welcome everyone to the November Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

We are very happy to have you on board again and we have a terrific conversation to share

with you. One that my colleague Casey Dreyer, our senior Space Policy Advisor at the Planetary

Society, also a chief advocate, has had with someone who has been kind of a regular on

Planetary Radio. First though, Casey, welcome back.

Thanks, Matt. I assume you're referring to Lindley Johnson, the impactful discussion that

we had about the upcoming, for us as we record this, launch of Dart, which will be the first

in-space test of asteroid deflection technology. I think there is a really wonderful and interesting

story there about how we are maturing this whole area of planetary defense from ground-based

observations now to in-space demonstrations and going forward into a permanent flight program,

four missions that aren't primarily about science or human spaceflight, but primarily about

defending the Earth from large impacts. So this program has just changed enormously over the

last 20 years and Lindley has been there pretty much every step of the way in the NASA side,

and we walk through how that has changed, why it changed, and then what to expect going forward.

It's a terrific conversation. As usual, I have been able to go through it and so I highly recommend

sticking around for this. It definitely covers some ground that we have not covered with Lindley

before on planetary radio. Here is a program note I expect that in the weekly planetary radio,

we're going to welcome back Nancy Shabo and possibly some other people who are directly involved

with the Dart mission. Nancy, of course, is the coordination lead at the applied physics lab,

which is the lead agency for development of Dart, and I'm looking forward to welcoming

her back for the beginning of this very, very important mission for those of us who deeply

care about planetary defense. We know that that includes a lot of you out there, especially those

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