Bhavya Lal Charts a Future for Humans in Space

By Bhavya Lal, Lisa Margonelli

On Science Policy IRL, we talk to people in science policy about what they do and how they got there. In this installment, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Bhavya Lal about the trajectory of her career. Lal began as a nuclear engineer, then completed a midcareer PhD and began to work in science policy. A few years in, she decided to specialize in space policy—which is when things really started to get interesting. Lal has since served in a variety of roles at NASA, including acting chief of staff, chief technology officer, and associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy. She is currently a professor at the RAND School of Public Policy. 

In this episode, Lal shares how policy and governance became her passion, how she went from writing reports to leading programs at NASA, and the big questions that drive her work.

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Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to the Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.

I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues. In our series, Science Policy IRL, we explore what science policy is and talk about science policy careers and how they can have unexpected and sometimes really amazing trajectories. In this installment, I am very excited to talk to Bhavya Lal, a leader in the space policy community who has had one of those really incredible careers. At NASA, Bhavya served as acting chief of staff, chief technology officer, and associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy. She is currently a professor at the RAND School of Public Policy. Bhavya, welcome!

Bhavya Lal: I’m thrilled to talk to you, Lisa.

Margonelli: You’ve had an amazing career in science policy, and who knows what you will do next. I’m really excited to talk to you about all the things that we usually talk about on this podcast. I think the first question is always, “How do you define science policy?”

Lal: I like to say that the definition of science policy is like a toothbrush. Everyone has their own, and no one likes to use someone else’s. I would just call science policy an invisible architecture that lets science actually matter. It’s not research, it’s not politics, it’s a wiring between them.

Think of it this way. Scientists can invent amazing things, vaccines, next-gen nuclear reactors, space telescopes, but someone has to decide which ideas get funded, how to test them safely, and how to make sure they actually benefit people. That decision-making process is science policy, and this is a process I’ve seen from every angle. I used to work at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where I helped make investment strategies for government agencies, NIH, NSF, more data driven and also help how governments can jumpstart new industries. And then I was at NASA, where I got to shape policies more directly, leading decisions around the Artemis Moon-to-Mars program, integrating economic analysis into how NASA makes choices. Of course, now as a professor, I get to teach the next generation how to bridge science and society, basically how to turn evidence into action.

So that’s what science policy is to me, making sure discovery doesn’t stay trapped in a paper or PowerPoint, but actually changes how we live, explore, and govern.

Margonelli: Well, that’s really exciting. You’re one of the first people who didn’t give Harvey Brooks’ answer.

Lal: It’s because I read that answer a really long time ago and, now, I’m in the trenches, making sausage, so I know what policy really is.

Margonelli: That is a really great segue to sort of the next question, which is, right now, you’re working as a professor at RAND, and you’re also doing some consulting. What does science policy look like for you? What were you doing last week?

Lal: Generally, I wear a lot of different hats in the science policy world, and again, I focus on space policy. In the past, I figured out or helped figure out how to safely generate and use nuclear power in space. Solar power is great, but it fades once you head towards Mars. The solar system is notoriously power desert-y.

Margonelli: Let me just back up here so that people can put this together in their heads, who don’t have any sense of how this goes together. One of the things that you’re doing in your current role is you’re looking for places in the space innovation system where white papers are needed or more information is needed for policymakers to do decision making between policies, and one of those is nuclear power in space?

Lal: That’s absolutely correct. I co-authored a national strategy on how the United States can finally break out of decades of failed starts and actually field a space nuclear system, and NASA listened. Earlier on, before that, I actually helped write the presidential memorandum that governs how both government and private missions can safely launch space nuclear systems. I’ve done work in planetary defense, which is a polite term for don’t get hit by an asteroid. And again, there, I helped the White House and NASA write a national strategy and an implementation plan on how we will first spot an asteroid coming our way, and then try to potentially stop it, and then try to recover from it. I got to play NASA administrator in a tabletop exercise where an asteroid was supposedly heading for Milwaukee. It was terrifying and hilarious.

Margonelli: One of the things that you do is you look for these places where clarity is needed. Sometimes it’s space nuclear systems, sometimes it’s asteroid policy, these other places, and you do research, and you release papers. And then what do you do with them afterwards? The paper doesn’t just happen and change people’s minds. You go out, and you do stuff to make the paper turn into something.

Lal: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that something I do starts well before the paper is finished. Even as I’m writing the paper, often it’s with colleagues, these are group projects, we are continually interacting with key stakeholders, whether they’re in academia, whether in industry, in government, in the White House, Congress, agencies. We are telling them what we are doing. We are getting feedback from them. And again, our paper isn’t going to say what they say, but we are listening, so we understand what the key issues are. So when the paper is done, it actually is something people know is coming. For the space nuclear paper, for example, the White House, NASA, Department of Defense, Congressional staffers, they had all been briefed before the report was even done. And then of course, once the report came out, it generated huge amounts of media interest because space nuclear is important.

Actually, that brings me, Lisa, to something that I’m actually working on right now. Sometimes I don’t just write big papers. Sometimes I write op-eds, or I speak at events where I think people who are in positions of influence are there. I’ve been thinking a lot about this new space race, the headlines that say China might beat us back to the Moon, and I find that framing baffling. The US landed on the Moon six times in the 1960s and ’70s—we’ve done it.

The question I’ve been asking and presenting in these more public settings is, “What does being first in space mean?” If we rush to plant another flag on the Moon and leave nothing behind that others use, that’s tourism. Is that what we want to do? But if we are the first to build a lunar reactor that powers everyone else’s outposts or the first to deploy a navigation network that other countries depend on, then we have shaped the rules of the game.

So think of the GPS. That was an American first that still defines global navigation. Every phone, every plane, every car relies on it. That’s enduring power.

Margonelli: Some of what you do is look deeply at technical questions, and some of what you do is really take the stories and narratives that people are using to influence political decisions about technology, like, “Oh, we need to win the race with China back to the Moon,” and you look at them for what they actually mean. In a sense, you’re looking closely at these narratives from a lot of different lenses to say, “What are we really talking about?”

Lal: That’s exactly right. The strategic and geopolitical ways, what is true leadership? Is it about racing to headlines, or is it about shaping the environment others operate in? For example, if another country lands first on the Moon, but our systems provide the power, the communication, the logistics they depend on, then we are leading. I get a chance to interact with decision makers on really thinking through what it means to lead in space. We already won the race to plant a flag. The next race is to build the field everyone else plays on, and how do you communicate that to stakeholders is what I think a lot about.

Margonelli: Wow. So that was kind of like what you were doing last week, was working on this op-ed? That’s great.

Lal: Well, I have published the op-ed, and I am actually now working on a journal paper.

Margonelli: Okay. When you publish an op-ed, does your phone suddenly light up with everybody you know being like… checking in?

Lal: It sure does, and I think that is one of the privileges of maybe being just older, that when I speak, people listen. But I also try very hard to be an honest broker, to not have an agenda, to be the neutral party, to really put the nation’s interests first as opposed to, “Hey, this thing is going to make my company a lot of money,” or, “This thing is going to make my agency get a big budget.” I try to inculcate the reputation that I don’t have a dog in the fight. I have worked very hard to do that. Once you succeed in that, people do listen to you, which is really great.

Margonelli: One of the things that I think is so wonderful about your career arc is you’ve just talked to us for like, I don’t know, 10 minutes about all these different space, really specific space ideas, but you didn’t start as a space person. You started as a physicist, I think.

Lal: I started as a nuclear engineer.

Margonelli: And then you got into policy. So tell us your evolution, how you ended up being the person who is kind of an honest broker in space.

Lal: I know all these people who in sixth grade knew what they wanted to do, and they just went for it. Well, that wasn’t me. Honestly, there wasn’t a single aha moment. It was bits and pieces of insight hitting at random points in life, completely unpredictable. Like most people in science policy, I had no idea that the field even existed. I started out as a nuclear engineer at MIT in the late ’80s. I worked summers at nuclear power plants in the United States, in Germany, so that was kind of my first big insight. Both Chernobyl and Challenger happened my freshman year–

Margonelli: Wow.

Lal: … and completely reshaped how I thought about technology. Obviously, overnight, the world’s faith in technology wobbled, and so did mine. And then in graduate school, I went to a talk about how the fear of nuclear weapons had helped spark the early US space program. We have this vision of John F. Kennedy’s soaring speeches, but the reality was that it was about how are we going to win this Cold War. This is when I realized that the real story wasn’t just about how we build technology. It was about why. It was about who decides what gets built and under what rules. So after I finished my master’s in nuclear engineering, I did a second one in technology policy this time, and I really wanted to understand how we make smart, responsible choices about science, not just how we design, but also how we govern.

And again, this is the meandering journey. About the same time, I was actually on a site visit to UC Santa Cruz, and there was this wonderful astrophysicist named Jerry Nelson who hands me this beat-up old paperback called Earth Abides. This is a book from the 1940s, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s this haunting novel where one man emerges from the mountains to find civilization gone and spends the rest of his life trying to rebuild it and fails. The message stuck with me. Technology is fragile, but society is even more so. I basically decided that our progress, our survival, depends as much on our values and policies as our inventions.

And then of course, at the same time, I’m seeing that many of our biggest problems, including Challenger and Chernobyl, but also climate change, energy, sustainability, space debris, they aren’t engineering problems anymore, they’re policy problems. One thing, especially in the space sector, that became clear to me is that solving off-planet challenges often helps solve problems right here on Earth.

Margonelli: Let’s back up a little bit. You had a degree in science policy, and that’s when you went to the Institute for Defense Analyses?

Lal: I worked at a private consulting firm called Abt Associates for a decade, where I actually did policy, but it was the breadth of policy, so I did science policy, economic policy, international policy. They kind of give me exposure to all areas of policy, and it was an extraordinary learning experience.

Margonelli: Wow.

Lal: And then I moved to IDA, yes.

Margonelli: When you were at IDA, you still weren’t doing space exclusively?

Lal: I wasn’t. I was working on science and innovation policy, doing a lot of work around evaluating NSF and NIH programs and deciding if they were working. One of my favorite evaluations was looking at the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award program, which was, at the time, a high-risk, high-reward research program, and we didn’t know how to measure them, so we had to invent new metrics to examine how you measure innovation in science. It wasn’t done. So that was a lot of fun. But yeah, over time, I realized that… I read the book, and I felt that I need to save civilization, and how do I save civilization? Maybe we need to expand in space. Maybe Earth has been our cradle for 200,000 years, at least as human beings. What happens if something happens to Earth? That’s kind of where my entry to space began.

But I think, for me, the biggest surprise, Lisa, was that the space sector was so unanalytical. It was full of true believers and, I’ll say it, hype artists, people who want to sell snake oil. But there were few people doing the basic arithmetic, like whether a private space station could actually make money, or whether mining asteroids would ever be profitable, or at least be profitable in the next decade. The loudest voices often had the most to gain. Since analysis was my jam, I figured, “Hey, why not jump in and help bring some rigor to the conversation?”

Margonelli: You were sort of sharpening your tools in all these different policy domains. You were learning to make metrics. You were learning to examine what was going on at NIH and what was going on at NSF. And then you decided that you were going to really focus on space because you saw this opportunity.

Lal: That’s a really insightful observation, Lisa, that I was learning all these different things. What was the norm in the evaluation community was seen as, “Wow, this is interesting in the space community.” So I’m bringing these insights laterally from one field to another, which I don’t think we do enough of. I think we need to do a lot more cross-pollination of capabilities. One thing I want to do more of is bring more cost-benefit analysis practices in the space sector. We have a James Webb Space Telescope, which cost 10 or $12 billion. Was that the best use of our money, given that the opportunity cost could have been a hundred smaller telescopes? That is not the kind of analysis we do when we make decisions in this domain.

Margonelli: Part of that, I think, has maybe a little bit to do with NASA’s formation and the way that projects and money are allocated through the legislative system, that projects develop champions and kind of move along.

Lal: Yes, that’s exactly right. NASA has a very strong sort of… there’s this parochialness to NASA projects and missions. We have a center in Alabama, the Marshall Space Flight Center, which does nuclear thermal propulsion, which is one way of propulsion to get to Mars or get to far-off places in space. The Alabama delegation in Congress is very, very powerful, so NASA funds nuclear thermal propulsion, not because it is a top priority, but because that’s what the Alabama delegation… which had its personnel and the appropriations subcommittees. I can give you 100 examples of things that either got created or got killed because of some congressional priority, but that isn’t the only one.

There is also, in the science world, the decadal process where scientists come together to tell NASA what their top priorities are. So yes, NASA has a lot of outsiders telling it what it must do, and so I always find it interesting when NASA gets blamed for things that go wrong. The most recent one is… Well, NASA’s funding these boondoggles, SLS, Space Launch System, which is an expensive rocket. NASA wasn’t the one that made the decision to proceed with SLS. Congress made NASA do it. Now, NASA… I can just give you a million examples, Lisa, of how decisions get made. That’s something I try to teach my students, that it isn’t even about the perfect analysis. After you do the analytical work, you need to overlay the stakeholder perspective just to kind of see where the politics are at, and that’s why I didn’t want to give that Harvey Brooks definition of science policy because it’s nice and it’s easy and it makes it look wonderful and clean, but the reality is it’s sausage making.

Margonelli: All right. Let’s talk about your career in sausage making because the most amazing thing happens. You’re at Institute for Defense Analyses, you start focusing on space policy, and then tell me what happens.

Lal: This was the other funny thing. I did a mid-career PhD, so I finished a PhD in 2012, and our then-director said, “Hey, what do you want to do next?” I’m not sure if she was hinting I should leave. I don’t know. Maybe she was. I said, “You know what? I would like to do space policy. I’m thinking about this.” I walked her through my rationale, and she said, “Sure. I don’t know how to help you, but go do.” So then, I had to figure out, “Well, what are the important problems in space?” There was a bunch of thinking that happened, and I decided that there’s this new thing that is becoming much bigger, commercial space. The first report I did was “What are these emerging trends in commercial space?” It was co-funded by the intelligence community and NASA. It was a good start. There was so much excitement around this new thing that was coming out of a private industry that was worth looking at, so that’s what we did.

And then we did some work on space situation awareness and space traffic management, which are… Basically, we have tens of thousands of satellites up in space. We don’t really know where everything is, which is kind of crazy. Imagine if you have roads on Earth and there’s no traffic lights and no rules and everybody’s driving in any which direction. Again, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but that’s how it almost is.

Margonelli: Yeah. If I can just interrupt, what’s really interesting to me about your story is how many layers you add to the story of science policy, because I think a lot of times people think of science policy as a little bit like the world and science and the policy community is a big machine and you’ve got a really big wrench and you make sure that there’s more money coming across the top and it trickles down into here. It’s a little bit like a Rube Goldberg machine. What you’re describing is something where there are layers and places where nobody made any deliberate decision. Nobody decided where all those satellites were going to go, where they were going to end up, how this was going to work, and so you’re working after the fact, trying, how do we make sense, how do we build policy, how do we go forward with a system that grew kind of organically, kind of weirdly. At first, there were just a few satellites up there. Now, there’s hundreds, if not thousands.

What you’re talking about is moving sort of through time and trying to pull all these different aspects of regulation and foresight and industry and even the ability to track sort of the geosensing or things that might be more in the realm of intelligence. You’re pulling all of these things together.

Lal: Yeah. I’m especially interested, Lisa, in problems that I call wicked, which may sound like Boston slang, but these are the problems that truly don’t have a solution, so all you can do is try to understand what the pieces are and what is the best you can do. How do you couple together a solution that is good enough to work? Those are the hardest problems we have, and those are the ones that interest me the most.

Margonelli: Let’s go back to your story because it just gets amazing. So you’re at IDA, and you’re working on different papers. Are they called papers at IDA, reports?

Lal: We wrote reports, but we also sometimes organize conferences in areas which were brand new. At the time, there was this emerging area called ISAM. Well, it’s not called ISAM. At the time, it didn’t have a name. Actually, that’s one of my claims to fame is I created the field of what I called OSAM, which is now ISAM, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing. We called it OSAM, and then suddenly everybody in NASA started calling it OSAM and create a new program called OSAM. Again, it is part of the policy process. If you see something new emerging, you give it coherence, you give it space. There’s meetings around it. The White House writes a strategy, and then an agency writes an implementation plan. That is also as much progress as writing a report.

Margonelli: So these ideas that you were working on then became real over at NASA. And then what happened?

Lal: I’m just loving my work. Now, we are at the COVID year. Again, we moved seamlessly into this online world that we found ourselves in. In October of 2020, I get a call from Avril Haines, who later on became the director of National Intelligence, asking if I would like to come help out on the President Biden transition team. I had no idea what a transition team was. Honestly, even though I was so close to the White House, I just didn’t follow politics as closely as I did policy. She told me a little bit, and I said, “Yes.”

And then, of course, I was on a transition team for NASA with eight amazing colleagues. The NASA transition team had eight people. I found out that the DOD team had 75 people, and DOD’s space budget is bigger than that of NASA, and there was not a single person who was working on space. I felt it was my duty to email somebody and say, “Hey, you should get somebody to do space for DOD because it is very, very important.”

And then, of course, since no good deed goes unpunished, they asked me if I would like to be that person. So then, I was on the NASA and DOD teams, working basically two full-time jobs over three months. Transition teams basically write out what an agency’s basic policies should be. They lay out the administration’s positions on different topics. By the end of December, we were all wrapping up our work, getting ready to hand things off. And then I got a call saying if I would like to be on the NASA team. And then, at the time, they just called it a Day 1 team, and they don’t really tell you what the position is. I said, “Sure, who doesn’t want to go to NASA?”

And then I go off to Georgia Tech where my daughter was an undergraduate and I take her out for dinner saying, “Hey, I start work tomorrow. I just wanted to come. I don’t know how busy my life’s going to get,” and I get a call during the middle of dinner in which they said, “Hey, do you want to be the chief of staff?” And I’m like, “Wait, what?” They said, “That means you’re the senior-most person at NASA, and you have to make some of the most important decisions for the first 100 days,” and I said, “Sure.” A day before I arrived at NASA, I was acting chief of staff, which was again a ride. I’ve never done anything like that. On January 21st, I showed up at NASA, and I said, “Okay, let’s do things,” and we tried to do things.

Margonelli: That’s a really amazing arc to go from studying the policy to actually being in a position to… I don’t know if you’re really… Partly, you’re implementing policy in that position, but also partly you’re kind of like a ringmaster.

Lal: You really are, and you are actually making some pretty big decisions. I can’t talk about a lot of the decisions here, but one I can talk about since it got brought up in a book without my input was that I got to be the person who decided that the Artemis Moon-to-Mars program will continue. The reason that’s a big deal is every time there was a presidential transition, we changed directions in a massive way. We were going to the Moon. And then President Obama came, and then we were going to… well, we worked on asteroid, and then we were going to Mars. And then President Trump came, and we were going to the Moon again. It’s this Moon, Mars, Moon, Mars, asteroid, Moon, Mars going on for decades, and it’s not good for the country, not good for our budget, and it’s certainly not good for the workforce. I got to announce that we will stick with the Moon program. That was a big decision, and there were some other big ones I got to make on how NASA would participate in some important climate things. It was pretty stressful because I’d never done anything like it before, but luckily, NASA has some really good people and very good advisors, and I was able to help in ways that were substantial. So that was nice.

Margonelli: Wow. That’s really exciting. That’s a very, very exciting story of science policy and of your life in it. You are constantly thinking about big questions like how we create sustainability in space by cleaning up the garbage that’s flying around, or how we create the human side of all of these technological decisions, how we manage them. What are the big concerns or questions that kind of keep you going, that motivate you?

Lal: The big question that drives me is actually pretty simple: How do we make sure technology makes life better, not just louder, faster, or flashier, especially in the context of space? In fact, I often get questions in my class where I’m teaching, “Why space? Isn’t that a luxury when we have so many problems on Earth?” My answer is space isn’t separate from Earth; it’s an extension of it. The technologies we built to survive in space, power systems, advanced recycling—two things we just talked about—robotics, ISAM, are the same ones that help us live more sustainably down on Earth. Space forces us to solve the hardest problems: how to reuse everything, how to thrive with limited resources, how to operate in extreme environments. It’s basically a lab for resilience, which takes me to my core goal, which is a bit much, but it is: How do we bring the solar system into our economic and scientific sphere? How do we make the universe part of the human story?

For thousands of years, our activity stopped at around 50 kilometers or, now that we have a space station, 400 kilometers above Earth’s surface. That boundary is in the law of nature. It’s just a limit of our capabilities. I want science and exploration to expand what’s possible for everyone, not just for a few. The same systems that power life on the Moon can power remote villages on Earth. The same policies that keep space sustainable can teach us how to care for our own planet. How we bring space into our daily lives is kind of what I’m all about. In my mind, that’s what real science policy is all about, building a future that’s not just sustainable, but generous, where discovery feeds opportunity and exploration serves everyone, and that’s what gets me out of bed every morning.

Margonelli: Want to learn more about space policy, cost-benefit analysis, or Bhavya Lal’s work? Check out our show notes.

Is there something about science policy that you’d like to know? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues. Thank you for listening.