Casey: Why do you think that public-private partnerships have grown so popular, despite seeing mixed outcomes in the last 10 years?

Marcia: I think that NASA is hoping to offload some of the upfront costs of development and get things done more quickly. We haven't seen it play out yet. The only success so far is commercial cargo. And I give credit to both SpaceX and to Orbital Sciences (now owned by Northrop Grumman). Both of those companies demonstrated that you could technically build the vehicles—the rockets and the spacecraft—to accomplish a task for a government customer. They probably did it less expensively than if NASA had used the traditional cost-plus contracts. What they haven't demonstrated is that there are other customers, so that from a business standpoint, they can make a go of it even if NASA stops paying for those services for whatever reason.

That's the key for these other things that NASA wants to use them for, like having commercial space stations where NASA is only one customer. I just don't know how you get there. We've had space stations galore. The first space station went up in 1971, a Russian station called Salyut 1, and after all these decades over which we've had space stations, we're still looking for that killer app that's going to demonstrate that there's something profitable that you can do with humans in space.

They're using a model that's unproven, not just for today, but they're building it into their future plans without any evidence that it's going to work out.

Casey: When the government is depending on these companies to provide a required service, it's never really a fixed price, right? It's never truly a partnership if the government needs a capability—it gives a lot of leverage to the companies developing it.

Marcia: We saw that decades ago with the evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) program. That was an early example of a public-private partnership. In the 1990s it looked like there was going to be a lot of launch business. So Boeing invested a lot of money in upgrading its rockets and Lockheed Martin spent a lot of money upgrading their rockets, in addition to some government money. And then the market collapsed. The government had to have launches and the companies said, "pay us more, otherwise we can't build these rockets." That's an example of a public-private partnership not working out.

We now have one example, commercial cargo, where it worked out from a technical standpoint. And that's all we have for data points. And yet, all the eggs are going into these public-private partnership baskets. Maybe it'll work out. I just note that, from a policy perspective, it's an additional risk.

Casey: The next decade is going to be a test of this hypothesis. We've made a lot of promises in terms of policy in the 2010s that are going to define the 2020s, and we're going to have to live with those consequences.

On the Decade as a Whole

Casey: What was frustrating or exciting in this last decade for you? Did you experience any kind of emotional color in last 10 years that was unique?

Marcia: I hate to use negative terminology. Because I don't really feel negative about the space program overall. But it was a surprise when Obama decided out of the blue to cancel Constellation without working that through the political system in advance, that's a lot of what undid it. If he had a great new idea of how to do human exploration, and he could have worked it out with key members of Congress in advance so it didn't just fall in their laps, then maybe something better could have come out of that.

So when we had Vice President Pence come seemingly out of the blue with this idea to do something which seems absolutely impossible, which is to get people back on the moon in 5 years, it had that same feel to it. It's a frustration.

I can't say that I feel more frustrated in 2019 than I did in previous decades, because I've been feeling pretty frustrated for quite a long time. We can't just seem to agree on the path forward and execute the plan.

Casey: I hear you. I'll put in a request for a discussion at the end of 2029 to and we can follow up then.

Marcia: [Laughs] I am not discussing Moon vs. Mars again. I'm done! Just pick one and do it.