You have opened up so many different things in this. One of them being that science policy for you is not just about implementing or getting to, you know, say the moon. It is about building and setting up systems that enable things for the future, which is a really interesting perspective. So I want to ask you a little bit about like, how do you do science policy in your day to day life? Like, what's a day in the life of Zach Pertle? So for my work for the Office of Technology Policy and

Strategy, the policy shop is really focused on providing good evidence backed advice to the NASA administrator and to try to provide strategic assessments and studies to help the administrator achieve the goals for the country that we're looking for from the space program. And so sometimes there are special requests that pop up about looking at what are the major policy questions leading up to a upcoming Artemis landing. And Artemis for us is our series of human missions that will land on the moon and that will help to pave the way towards increasingly more complex missions on towards Mars eventually. And so there's different things that pop up, so specific studies that I'm called to help serve on. For example, I organized a workshop in April about what are the ethical and societal implications of the overall moon to Mars effort and how should we think about them. So for a day to day perspective, it's almost like organizing a wedding, trying to get a lot of great experts different perspectives. We really sought to get in people from social science and humanities backgrounds that could help to understand the broader societal impact. And the broader societal impact of spaceflight in a way that trained engineers often aren't encouraged or asked to look into. There were different NASA engineers and scientists in the room along with these outside scholars. I was a bit of trying to get people to talk the same language, whereas people are coming from very different backgrounds, but end up being very exciting and affirming and that we had a wonderful conversation and that a lot of people are trying to think through how could we do better and how could we try to think about these longer term implications now. There's a lot to unpack in that. If I were to more literally say like what's done in a day, there could be three or four engineering status tag ups that I need to dial into a day. What is an engineering status tag up? Yeah, so we've got different deliveries that we're sending science and technology payloads to the moon. And I have to help oversee two of those deliveries, including the third and two of the machines delivery, which is a company that's part of our commercial inter payload services work. I'm that's going to deliver a rover to Reiner gamma, which has this fascinating magnetic swirls on the surface of the moon. And we understand exactly what past magnetic activity caused and created those swirls. So we're hoping to do really good science on that. But we've been tracking and working to look at are the instruments on track. Are we going to be okay with having lunar land already? We're actively managing budgets and trying to make sure that we're able to balance and look at all the funding that we have to get our activities to work together towards doing more science on the moon. So there's a lot going on there. The NASA headquarters is this fun barrier between the NASA centers that are leading the work on the technical side. And we're trying to provide a strategic and unified vision on how to help our stakeholders in Congress and the White House and internationally as we're trying to move forward. So there's a lot that goes on there from an engineering and policy perspective.

So you have these phone calls where you check in on a rover that's

going to drive around these magnetic swirls and measure them. Yeah, make sure the rovers on track to succeed too. Yeah. Want to make sure they're going to succeed. Wow. Well, that sounds pretty exciting. I mean, what's your favorite part of your job? I have to say the work I'm doing for the OTPS, the policy shop and helping engineers think this bigger picture. I'm very lucky. I'm able to do this. Stay connected towards engineering work. We're going back to the moon for the first time in 50 years, but also try to think bigger and try to do these studies that are pushing the boundary on how are the engineering decisions we're making today really going to shape humanity's future in space. So there are ways we should be doing it better. I feel that's something that NASA can help lead. And I'm so excited that OTPS and NASA have been pursuing

this work. Okay. So you've got a degree in engineering and you've got a degree in philosophy and you end up at NASA doing sort of a mixture of engineering things that are going to the moon and the philosophy of space travel to Mars at a certain level. So how did you get this job? What was your path? First of all, you start off as an engineer. Why did you become an

engineer in high school? I was a speech and abates fan. I just loved trying to have principled arguments to try to think through debate to the pros and cons of something. And I also love science fiction deeply. I kind of stumbled into engineering. My dad was an engineer and my brother ended up also becoming an engineer. And I think I was trying to search for something that was more than just the technical work. And I was lucky as an undergrad at Arizona State. I took a philosophy of science class about my second or third year and helped really crystallize for me like, holy cow, the reason why you do all these endless homework assignments is that you're actually learning a paradigm about how to do engineering and that the pain is actually for a deeper and higher purpose. And eventually I was able to get a job as an engineering intern and I got to see the context there. And then I was so lucky that I ended up working with people like Dan Sarah with today Arizona State's Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes. And a lot of what I was saying earlier really follows from Sarah what's his vision about whether science policy matters and how you can do more good for society in that. For me that was crystallizing. I ended up getting hired after my master's degree through something called the Presidential Management Fellowship. Just to back up for a second. Okay, so you got a master's degree in philosophy or you

got the master's degree in engineering.

I got the master's degree in civil and environmental engineering, but I had a philosopher as my co-chair for my committee. At a certain point in time I really thought I was going to go become a philosopher of science. But who focused on engineering in a very rigorous and technical way. And after that degree I was actually hired by NASA and ended up getting into an engineering role. And I did later pursue and finish my PhD in systems engineering. Again with the philosopher of science on my committee. So I've tried to keep staying in both of those worlds. And philosophy of science is really it's something special about getting towards the conceptual foundations and also the values that underlie a lot of what scientists and engineers do. So a lot of my work was on modeling and how do you think about values and sort of the epistemic limits of modeling.