What is The Planetary Society and Why is It Important?

A Public Force for Space Exploration

The Planetary Society stands as one of the world’s most prominent and influential non-profit organizations dedicated to space exploration. It’s not a government agency like NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA), nor is it a private aerospace corporation like SpaceX. Instead, it operates from a unique position: a membership-based organization fueled by public donations and a shared passion for discovery. Its mission is to empower citizens to advance space science and exploration. Through a combination of direct-funded projects, widespread educational outreach, and relentless political advocacy, the Society has established itself as a powerful voice for scientific curiosity, pushing humanity to explore other worlds, search for life, and protect Earth from cosmic threats.

Origins and Founding Vision

The story of The Planetary Society begins in 1980, a period of uncertain momentum for space exploration. The Apollo program had ended nearly a decade earlier, and while missions like the Viking program to Mars and the Voyager grand tour of the outer planets were spectacular successes, public and political enthusiasm for funding planetary science was waning.

This perceived lull in momentum spurred three visionaries to act. The organization was co-founded by astronomer Carl Sagan, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director Bruce Murray, and engineer Louis Friedman. Sagan, already a celebrated science communicator through his television series Cosmos, brought an unparalleled ability to connect with the public and articulate the wonder of space. Murray provided the experience of managing complex interplanetary missions, while Friedman offered the strategic expertise to guide the organization’s projects and advocacy.

Their shared idea was simple yet powerful: the exploration of space should not be the exclusive domain of governments. It should be a collective human endeavor, supported and driven by the public. They believed that a non-governmental organization, funded by ordinary citizens, could demonstrate public support for exploration, influence policy, and even conduct its own space projects. This vision of a citizen-funded, publicly engaged organization dedicated to the cosmos became the bedrock of The Planetary Society.

Mission and Core Principles

The Planetary Society’s work is structured around a few core pillars that guide its activities. These principles reflect the passions of its founders and the enduring questions that drive human exploration.

The first pillar is to Explore Worlds. This involves advocating for and supporting robotic missions to explore our solar system and beyond. This includes exploring the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets within our own cosmic neighborhood. The Society champions missions that seek to understand the geology, atmosphere, and history of these celestial bodies, from the potential oceans of Europa to the methane lakes of Titan and the ancient riverbeds of Mars.

The second pillar is to Find Life. This is the pursuit of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The Society has a long history of supporting projects that scan the skies for signals from other civilizations. It also advocates for missions that search for signs of past or present life, even microbial, on other worlds like Mars or in the subsurface oceans of icy moons.

The third pillar is to Defend Earth. This focuses on planetary defense, the effort to identify and mitigate the threat posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs). The Society funds programs that help astronomers find and track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. It also advocates for government-funded missions to test and develop methods for deflecting an object on a collision course with Earth.

Underpinning all these pillars is the foundational goal of Engaging the Public. The Society works to educate and inspire people of all ages, fostering a global community of space enthusiasts. It translates complex scientific concepts into accessible information and provides a platform for citizens to become active participants in the space exploration enterprise.

Leadership and Public Profile

For decades, the Society was led by its co-founders, with Louis Friedman serving as executive director. In 2010, the organization entered a new era with the appointment of Bill Nye as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Nye, widely known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy” from his popular 1990s television show, brought an immense public profile and a new energy to the organization.

Nye’s leadership has been characterized by a heightened focus on public outreach and a more visible, assertive advocacy presence. As a student of Carl Sagan at Cornell University, Nye inherited his mentor’s passion for science communication. As CEO, he has become the public face of the Society, appearing frequently in media, testifying before the U.S. Congress, and using his platform to champion the case for space science and exploration.

While Nye is the most visible figure, the Society is guided by a Board of Directors composed of prominent scientists, engineers, authors, and public figures. The board has included individuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson, actor Robert Picardo, and space policy expert Casey Dreier. This leadership team steers the organization’s strategic direction, ensuring its projects and policies remain aligned with its core mission.

Crowdfunding and Public Engagement

Unlike government agencies, The Planetary Society relies almost entirely on the financial support of its members and individual donors. This funding model is central to its identity. It operates as a global community of people who have pooled their resources, however small, to make a tangible impact on space exploration. This worldwide membership gives the organization financial independence and a powerful political mandate; when it speaks, it does so on behalf of hundreds of thousands of engaged citizens.

The Society’s public engagement efforts are extensive and multi-faceted, designed to inform, inspire, and involve its members.

The Planetary Report

The organization’s flagship publication is The Planetary Report, a quarterly magazine sent to members. This full-color print and digital magazine features in-depth articles on planetary missions, scientific discoveries, and space policy. The content is written by leading scientists, engineers, and science journalists, providing members with authoritative and accessible information that goes far beyond typical news headlines. It covers everything from the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope to detailed analyses of NASA’s budget.

Planetary Radio

For those who prefer auditory learning, the Society produces Planetary Radio. This long-running weekly podcast and radio show, hosted for over two decades by Mat Kaplan, offers listeners a direct line to the heart of the space exploration community. Each episode features interviews with the people who make exploration happen: astronauts, astronomers, engineers, mission leaders, and policymakers.

The show’s success has led to spin-offs, including Space Policy Edition, which provides a deep dive into the political and financial decisions that shape the future of space. This consistent, high-quality media outreach ensures that members are not just passive donors but are actively and continuously educated about the field they are supporting.

Digital Outreach

The Society’s website, Planetary.org, serves as a central hub for news, educational resources, and advocacy campaigns. It features articles, blogs, and explainers on a vast array of space topics, from the basics of solar sailing to the search for Planet Nine. Its “Action Center” allows members to easily contact their government representatives to voice support for specific missions or policies, turning passive interest into active political participation.

Flagship Projects: Proving New Technologies

While advocacy is a major component of its work, The Planetary Society has also distinguished itself by funding and managing its own hardware and technology demonstration projects. These projects are often designed to test novel concepts that government agencies might consider too risky or unproven, effectively paving the way for future missions.

The LightSail Program: Riding on Beams of Light

The Society’s most celebrated technical achievement is the LightSail program. This multi-year, multi-mission project was designed to demonstrate the feasibility of controlled solar sailing using a small, citizen-funded spacecraft.

A solar sail is a form of spacecraft propulsion that uses the pressure of sunlight for thrust. While photons(particles of light) have no mass, they have momentum. When they reflect off a large, shiny surface, they transfer a tiny amount of that momentum, creating a small but continuous push. In the vacuum of space, this constant, gentle thrust can accelerate a spacecraft to very high speeds over time, without the need for heavy and expensive chemical propellants. Carl Sagan himself had promoted the concept on television decades earlier.

The Society’s first attempt, Cosmos 1, was a joint project with a Russian space company. It was launched in 2005 on a Volna rocket but was lost due to a launch vehicle failure.

Undeterred, the Society regrouped and launched the crowdfunded LightSail 1 mission in 2015. This was a preliminary test flight designed primarily to test the sail deployment sequence. After some technical challenges, the team successfully commanded the spacecraft to deploy its 32-square-meter sail, proving the basic mechanism worked.

The main event was LightSail 2, launched in 2019. This much more ambitious mission was not just about deploying the sail; it was about demonstrating controlled solar sailing. The spacecraft, a tiny satellite known as a CubeSat (roughly the size of a loaf of bread before deployment), was a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

After being released into Earth orbit, LightSail 2 successfully deployed its Mylar sail. The mission’s objective was to raise its orbit using only the pressure of sunlight. To do this, the spacecraft had to “tack” like a sailboat. As it orbited the Earth, it would turn its sail edge-on to the sunlight when moving toward the sun, and face-on when moving away, maximizing the push to progressively raise the high point of its orbit (the apogee).

The mission was a stunning success. LightSail 2 became the first spacecraft in Earth orbit to demonstrate controlled solar sailing by raising its orbit. It proved that this propellant-free technology was viable. The mission, entirely paid for by public donations, provided invaluable data and flight experience for a technology that could one day be used for low-cost, long-duration missions to other planets or even interstellar space. The spacecraft operated for over three years before its orbit naturally decayed, and it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in 2022, far exceeding its primary mission goals.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

The Planetary Society has been a key player in SETI for decades. This work became especially important in 1993, when the U.S. Congress directed NASA to terminate all of its SETI projects. Seeing a vital scientific endeavor at risk, The Planetary Society stepped in to secure private funding and keep the search alive.

The Society helped fund Project META (Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay) and its successor, Project BETA(Billion-channel Extra-Terrestrial Assay). These projects, based at Harvard University’s Oak Ridge Observatory, conducted systematic scans of the sky for narrow-band radio signals, the type of signal a civilization might use for communication.

The Society has also been a pioneer in Optical SETI. This branch of SETI operates on the hypothesis that an advanced civilization might communicate using powerful, pulsed laser beams, which could be more efficient for interstellar communication than radio waves. The Society has funded searches at observatories like Lick Observatory and Harvard, developing specialized detectors to look for these nanosecond-fast flashes of light from distant star systems.

Planetary Defense: Protecting the Home World

The Planetary Society is a global leader in advocating for and funding planetary defense initiatives. The organization works to raise public awareness that the asteroid impact threat is a solvable, natural disaster. Its efforts are split between funding front-line observers and advocating for large-scale government missions.

The Shoemaker NEO Grant Program

One of the Society’s most impactful initiatives is the Gene Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant program. Named after the legendary geologist and planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, this program provides small grants to amateur astronomers and underfunded professional observatories around the world.

These astronomers form a critical, global network for discovering, tracking, and characterizing near-Earth objects. The big government-funded surveys, like the Catalina Sky Survey, find the majority of new objects, but this global network of smaller observers performs the essential follow-up work. They track the new object over days and weeks to precisely calculate its orbit, determining whether or not it poses a threat to Earth.

A Shoemaker Grant might provide an observatory in Brazil or Italy with enough money to buy a more sensitive CCD camera, a new telescope mount, or upgraded computer hardware. This modest investment can dramatically increase an observatory’s effectiveness, enabling it to detect fainter objects and provide more precise data. The program has funded observers in dozens of countries, directly contributing to the discovery of thousands of asteroids and helping to refine the orbits of countless more.

Here is a table showing representative examples of past grant winners, illustrating the program’s global reach and practical focus.

Advocating for Deflection Missions

Beyond finding asteroids, the Society has been a primary advocate for testing ways to deflect one. For years, it lobbied the U.S. Congress and NASA to fund a kinetic impactor mission – a mission that would crash a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if its trajectory could be changed.

This advocacy was instrumental in the approval of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The DART spacecraft, launched in 2021, traveled to the binary asteroid system Didymos. In 2022, it intentionally slammed into Didymos’s small moonlet, Dimorphos. The collision was a spectacular success, altering Dimorphos‘s orbital period by 32 minutes – far more than the minimum required for success. The Planetary Society celebrated this as a watershed moment for humanity, proving for the first time that we have the technology to defend our planet from a potential impact.

The Society continues to advocate for follow-up missions and for the development of the Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor), a space-based infrared telescope that will be highly effective at finding the remaining undiscovered hazardous asteroids.

Advocacy and Political Influence

A significant portion of The Planetary Society’s resources is dedicated to advocacy. It acts as a registered lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., but one that represents the public’s interest in space exploration, not corporate profits. Its space policy team works directly with the U.S. Congress, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and NASA leadership to shape the future of space science.

The Society’s advocacy is data-driven and persistent. They argue that planetary exploration is a good investment, yielding scientific knowledge, technological innovation, economic benefits, and a unique source of inspiration for the next generation of scientists and engineers.

A key part of this effort is the annual “Day of Action.” Every year, the Society flies in dozens of its members from across the United States for a day of meetings on Capitol Hill. These members – engineers, teachers, students, and enthusiasts – meet face-to-face with their congressional representatives and staff to explain why space exploration matters to them as constituents. This grassroots approach puts a human face on space exploration and demonstrates a broad, active base of support.

The Society’s advocacy has led to tangible “wins.” It has been a leading voice in fighting budget cuts to NASA’s planetary science division. It was a key supporter for restoring and securing funding for the Europa Clipper mission, a flagship spacecraft now on its way to study Jupiter‘s icy moon Europa and its potential subsurface ocean. The organization has also been a major proponent of the Mars Sample Return campaign and has consistently pushed for a flagship mission to the ice giants, Uranus or Neptune, which has now become a top priority in the scientific community’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey.

Exploring the Planets: Project Involvement

Beyond its own spacecraft, The Planetary Society has a history of partnering with space agencies to include unique, publicly-funded instruments or experiments on major missions.

Hearing the Sounds of Mars

One of the Society’s longest-running goals was to place a microphone on Mars. The founders believed that hearing the sounds of another world – the wind, the dust storms, the snap of a laser – would provide a new and powerful way for the public to connect with exploration.

The Society’s first attempt was the “Mars Microphone,” which it funded for NASA’s Mars Polar Lander mission in 1999. Tragically, the lander was lost on arrival.

The dream did not die. The Society continued to advocate for microphones on future missions. This persistence finally paid off more than two decades later with the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021. This rover carries two microphones. One captured the sounds of the rover’s landing, and another, mounted on its mast, has recorded the first-ever sounds from the Martian surface, including the faint whisper of Martian wind and the sounds of the rover’s own wheels crunching over the soil. A microphone on the Ingenuity helicopter also recorded the sound of its blades spinning in the thin Martian atmosphere. These audio recordings, the fulfillment of a long-held Society goal, were shared with the world, adding a new sensory dimension to our understanding of the red planet.

Red Rover Goes to Mars

The Society has also focused on student engagement. For NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission (which included the Spirit and Opportunity rovers), the Society partnered with the LEGO Company. The “Red Rover Goes to Mars” project included DVDs on the rovers carrying the names of millions of people. It also involved developing educational materials that used LEGO bricks to help students understand the engineering challenges of building and landing a Mars rover.

A Global Community

From its start with a few thousand members, The Planetary Society has grown into a global organization with members in virtually every country on Earth. It serves as a crossroads, connecting the public not only with NASA but with other space agencies like JAXA (Japan) and ISRO (India). It emphasizes that space exploration is a unifying activity for the human species, one that transcends national borders.

This global community is the organization’s greatest asset. It provides the funding for projects like LightSail, the political clout for its advocacy in Washington, D.C., and the audience for its educational programs. It’s a demonstration that the vision of Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman was correct: that ordinary people, when united by a grand idea, can actively participate in and shape humanity’s future in space.

Summary

The Planetary Society occupies a unique and vital space in the 21st-century space exploration landscape. It is more than just a fan club; it is an active participant. It translates public enthusiasm into tangible action, whether that’s funding a satellite, supporting an astronomer, or influencing national policy.

From its origins as an idea shared by three concerned scientists, it has grown into a global force. Under the leadership of Bill Nye, it has amplified its public voice, reminding the world of the value of science and discovery. Through the stunning success of LightSail 2, it proved that a citizen-funded organization can successfully run its own space mission. Through its Shoemaker NEO Grant program and its advocacy for missions like DART, it has become a serious player in the defense of our planet.

By connecting scientists, engineers, policymakers, and the public, The Planetary Society ensures that the quest to explore the cosmos and search for answers to humanity’s deepest questions remains a shared endeavor, driven not just by governments, but by the power of public passion.