“I was promised like retina scanners and, you know, everything clean and glowing and fluorescent. And instead, you know, we're kind of going around hat in hand… I can't do the analyses that I need to do. And that's my job. And so it feels very weird to say I left NASA in order to do science, but that's kind of true. And that's really sad, right?”

of the way NASA is portrayed in, You know, the media and movies, it's not going door to door asking to borrow a desk for a day.

Yeah, it's like going to the moon. That's what I think of like doing big things and exciting, exciting stuff, not like looking for space.

It is really sad. And I think it's a perspective that's easy to get lost in the media coverage, honestly. It is just like the focus is always on the institutional pieces. But you are a scientist, and just hearing you say, I couldn't do my job, I think is something a lot of folks can relate to when…

Well, I'm worried. I'm really worried about publicly funded science. I say this as somebody who just believes so strongly that science should be publicly funded. Scientists should work for American taxpayers and they should be accountable to American taxpayers. And we should be making the case for

why doing this kind of blue skies exploratory research is important to the economy, to people's health, to our education, you know, to everything. I think it's important for us to work for the public. But now it seems like publicly funded science is a football. It's subject to political whims. And…