Around 83 percent of NASA’s facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance.
Having just submitted an article about a commercial spacewalk, I’m depressed that space is destined to be owned by corporations. This won’t get funded. Politicians will point to how much more efficient private companies do this. Eff.
I’m a scientist who is contracted through NASA and work at one of the NASA facilities. As an early career scientist, working here is a dream job. I get the opportunity to work with absolute world class scientists everyday. That said, the funding situation is dire at all NASA facilities due to funding cuts. The current saying is “flat is the new up” in terms of funding. That means if NASA maintains its funding, it’s a win. As a result, NASA would rather maintain science and engineering with the limited budget, but at the expense of the facilities themselves. I can attest that it is a stark difference between someplace like the Applied Physics Lab at Hopkins (lots of military contracts) vs Goddard Space Flight Center in terms of the quality of the facilities.
The problem is Congress looks for funding cuts in discretionary funding. Mandatory funding consists of social security, healthcare, and veteran programs. Discretionary funding is everything else, which makes up only roughly 25% of the rest of the budget. Military takes half of the discretionary budget. Democrats nor Republicans dare to touch the military budget despite the fact they fail their audit every single year. This leaves 900 billion for everything else. NASA gets about 4% of that.
Since the tax code is totally fucked up in this country, the richest people pay the least percentage through loopholes and corporations barely pay anything (9% of the total revenue), it’s up to the working class to make up the difference. Since understandably no one wants their taxes raised, in order to reduce spending they look to the “everything else” part of the discretionary budget. And NASA is part of this and is considered expendable. It’s sad to see such an important institution for the U.S. slowly dying. I want to believe the outlook is promising, but I just can’t see the future looking any brighter.
In the end, space will become like ships, rail and air. Initially it was funded by government, then grew out of that funding model. We’re going to see the same with space.
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with private space companies.
Love:
- More and cheaper access to space is ultimately a good thing (gotta get to the Star Trek future somehow)
- What SpaceX has done with reusable boosters is game changing. I hate Musk, but I try to not think about him when I think of SpaceX
Hate:
- It’s more “socializing the cost, privatizing the profits” where much of their funding came or continues to come from government grants/contracts. It’s almost the same model as the pharmaceutical industry.
- It’s a billionaire’s game, and we’re all being exploited to fund it (beyond tax dollars at least partially funding them).
As far as NASA facilities getting their funding: Remember that SLS exists and is made entirely out of pork. So at least those facilities will continue to get funding because they’re essentially jobs programs for a handful of states.
Yet they just keep giving away the NASA budget to private for-profit companies.
This was by design to kickstart the private industry for space development.
NASA could have just kept building and flying space shuttles, but since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011, they were renting payload space on Russian rockets to get stuff into orbit.
Getting off of dependence on Russian rockets turned out to be tremendous foresight.
Just to add some context: the entire space shuttle program, over its entire life from 1972 to 2010, was reportedly 200 Billion.
In 2010, the yearly U.S. military budget was ~650 billion. And they killed the shuttle for being too expensive because that wasn’t spread over enough lunches. (meaning it cost 1.6Billion per launch).
In 2024, even adjusted for inflation, Starliner has already blown past 1.6 Billion per launch (total cost is about 5.8 Billion)
Only Crew Dragon, at 2.4 Billion, has reached parity with what the shuttle cost per launch (inflation adjusted). (Dragon 1, which flew 23 cargo missions, was drastically cheaper).
And both of these are dramatically simpler designs than the space shuttle was.
So it appears that the trajectory is correct, space travel is getting cheaper, but it took a shitload of work to get there, and that’s building on top of what the Shuttle program taught us.
Well, that’s really an attempt at saving money. And it’s a strategy that actually works with some of their contractors. (Not so much with Boeing and ULA)
The problem is that they really need more budget. There’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t have five times the funding they have now. The US military had a budget of 820 billion last year, NASA used 200 million. Meaning, that you could quintuple NASA’s budget with an additional 800 million by shifting 0.1% of military funding their way.
Personally, I think NASA is more than 0.1% as important as our military, but that’s just me.
Just to put that in perspective: that’s less than a dollar per American for NASA and over a thousand dollars for the military.
