This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Budget

Putting NASA's Budget Into Perspective

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 17, 2012
Filed under ,

It’s Tax Day — Send in Your $.005 for NASA, Discovery
“I’ve always wondered why are we cutting it? Why aren’t we doubling it? Even then, it wouldn’t be a full percent of what our federal budget is. Double it and actually fund it so that you can work successfully toward starting and finishing something. All this starting and stopping stuff — that’s not an efficient way to go forward,” she said.”
At least double NASA’s annual budget to one penny for every government dollar spent, We The People Petition
“Tomorrow is gone without NASA. Please at least double NASA’s annual budget, and continue to support the most inspirational program in the country.
– SIGNATURES NEEDED BY APRIL 20, 2012 TO REACH GOAL OF 25,000
– TOTAL SIGNATURES ON THIS PETITION 25,687”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

21 responses to “Putting NASA's Budget Into Perspective”

  1. chriswilson68 says:
    0
    0

    Double, or quadruple, the money going to space exploration, yes!

    Double the money going to NASA?  No.  Not if they’re going to squander it on Constellation-like waste.

    If we were just to take all of NASA’s human spaceflight budget and put it into fixed-price, pay-for-performance, open competition procurement with the government specifying the end result, and not how to get there, we’d have a far more capable program than if we were to simply double the amount of money going into the current NASA organization.

    If you don’t have enough water coming out of your tap because the pipes are leaking most of it, the solution is to first patch up the pipes to stop the waste, not just try to force more water through.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
      0
      0

      Chris,

      I absolutely agree with you. First priority: fix the taps. The amount of water we’ve lost in the last few decades is enough to float our spacecraft to LEO. However…

      with the government specifying the end result, and not how to get there

      I think there is still a problem here because, as we’ve seen in the past, the aerospace companies are not above working together to keep prices up, like the oil companies have done with gasoline prices for so long. They each maintain about the same portions of the total sales pie, but that pie continues to increase in price. If any of the companies were to produce something with significantly better performance and/or capability, it would be for the purpose of trying to increase their market share, but again, from what we’ve seen in the past, there is no incentive to provide such increases (assuming it’s even possible) since they can increase revenues by simply increasing overall market prices, which is much less risk, has much faster turn-around times, and doesn’t require investing their own profits into R&D.

      So, in addition to fixing the pipes at NASA you’ve got to increase the efficiency and control over the water processing systems — the aerospace contractors. One method for doing this might be to include itemized price brackets on RFPs. Staying with the analogy, you’ll also have to modify the water delivery contracts so that the water is made available where it will do the most good for the nation, not just into the swimming pools of Congress people and their friends. If this was done then there would be no SLS and outfits like ATK would actually have to develop better products instead of just marginally improved thrust every few years.

      I tend to shy away from expressing briefly-stated solutions, because behind every solution to a problem, two more other problems are hiding. We can’t fix one component of a system and simply assume that the remaining components will modify themselves and cooperatively fall into line. You can’t fix just NASA and hope that government and contractors with change their ways so as to interact the way you want them to with a changed NASA.

      I’m not saying that I don’t think it can be done. I do think it can. But it will be complicated. We’d need an overall, detailed plan, a detailed implementation strategy for that plan, and cooperative commitment from all of the players to adhere to the plan, always. Until this is done I see little point in discussing increases in budget because we don’t know what the costs will be for a revised modus operandi; it might actually be cheaper than what we’re spending now.

      It’s often useful to have a tag line or a single-word label to get people thinking a new way. We could use such a word for your phrase “Constellation-like waste” to drive home the point.

      Steve

  2. kapzen says:
    0
    0

    There is one problem with this: Nowhere else does one get less return per dollar spend than in space. Human spaceflight is plain and simple too expensive, and this is not going to change fundamentally. Even spaceX and others will not cut costs/kg by 90% or so.

    We have spend hundreds of billions of dollars (and rubles, euros, etc…) on human spaceflight and only managed to carry a low-three-digit number of people into space?

    People are interested in human spaceflight, see the bookings for Virgin Galactic. The only thing stopping large-scale human spaceflight from becoming a reality are the enormous costs. The only solution I can come up with is to cancel human spaceflight and fund technology research with a portion of that money (both – government and private sector). This money will be “lost” too because it will not generate any return, but it may open doors to technologies that could have a reasonable return on investment in the future, enabling large scale human spaceflight. What we are doing now is re-enacting Appollo with half the capabilities and double the cost. This will get us nowhere and will guarantee the cancellation of HSF down the line – without a research program to restart it with new concepts.

    Nasa doesn’t need more money, it needs a new structure.

    And I repeat: Cut the costs.

    The ISS will have cost 140 billion $ (140.000.000.000). For that money, you could buy:

    20 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers;

    150 large (1,000 ft +) ocean-cruisers (half the world’s current fleet);

    300 Airbus A-380 aircraft;

    300,000 single family homes;

    1,000,000 S-class Mercedes

    How do you justify these expenses for a space station with doubtul scientific benefit? To show the people it can be done? Now NASA wants to have double the budget to still-not-deliver anything of value except a couple nice tweets from space, eerrrr – I mean Low Earth Orbit, eerrrr – I mean the high Earth athmosphere?

  3. guest says:
    0
    0

    Um, i dont know about you, but the chunk of money i paid in taxes in year was substantially larger than a dollar, and for the proportion/chunk that i sent to NASA i could personally afford numerous nice things. No, i would NOT like to double it.

    • blamethemall says:
      0
      0

      Assuming you paid 20k in taxes, not many nice things are in the $100 range anymore.

      • guest says:
        0
        0

        Um, no, i paid about five times that. And there are several much more efficient  ways of advancing spaceflight than handing this to NASA.

    • Knobby Rat says:
      0
      0

      Extrinsic goals: affording numerous nice things.   I suppose that’s the problem here, what we value. 

    • Nassau Goi says:
      0
      0

       Assuming that ~100k net tax is on the high end of the income tax bracket (37% ) that puts you in the 250K+ annual income club

      .5% of 100k is $500. The things you could buy for the NASA tax proportion are minimal to what you could buy. $500 can’t even pay a months rent nowadays.

      I do think NASA has plenty of waste, and plenty of money could be used
      elsewhere…. But you’re complaining about $500? out of a 100k tax bill?

      $16-24 Trillion dollars went to bailout foreign and domestic financial entities since 2007. We have a $16 Trillion dollar deficit.

      Where are your priorities? NASA is hardly a problem in terms of the widespread waste in the government. Unless the whole basis for your income is maintaining that bias, I don’t see where you’re coming from.

      • guest says:
        0
        0

        Yes, if i would get to choose, i could have given this $500 to a scout master to take his bunch to launch rockets, several times. That would actually have a positive impact for our future in space, versus the almost detrimental effect of giving it to NASA

  4. Paul451 says:
    0
    0

    Double the civilian space budget, yes, but not one extra cent to NASA. Any new funding could be split between three ARPA-Space type agencies, one focused on launchers and LEO-HSF tech to seed commercial development, the second focused on BEO-HSF enabling tech, and the third researching unmanned BEO tech. Each with a mix of blue-sky research and commercial test flights.

    (Plus I’d like to see NACA spun off again to an independent agency.)

    And the fact that I/we are already squabbling over funding shows why this double-the-funding idea will fail.

  5. Mark Shackelford says:
    0
    0

    So you all want to double or quadruple the US civilian space budget without giving any money to NASA? You brainiacs do realize what the name of the US civilian space agency is, right? And that DARPA is not a civilian agency, right?

    Sheesh.

    Double NASA’s budget and I guarantee you will see some serious “stuff” getting done there. We actually could have a permanently manned base on the moon sooner than the date that current administration is planning to visit some random space rock for its flags-and-footprints stunt.

  6. newpapyrus says:
    0
    0

    Folks who are against raising the NASA budget just don’t want a government space program! That’s just their anti-government extremist philosophy!

    Yet they want to give tax payer money to private space companies that have no loyalty to the American people and would sell the  technology that the tax payer’s helped to finance to a fascist state like China in a nanosecond– for the right price.

    NASA is not a failure! In fact, there is no public or private space organization that even comes close to what NASA has achieved in space exploration, technological advancement, and in helping to grow our economy. Our public investment in space has made this country much wealthier than it would be if we hadn’t!

    Marcel F. Williams

    • chriswilson68 says:
      0
      0

      “Folks who are against raising the NASA budget just don’t want a government space program!”

      Wrong.  Everyone who expressed an opinion on this thread so far explicitly stated that they wanted more money to be spent by the government on space.  We simply want it spent in a different way, to get more done per tax dollar spent.

      “Yet they want to give tax payer money to private space companies that
      have no loyalty to the American people and would sell the  technology
      that the tax payer’s helped to finance to a fascist state like China in a
      nanosecond”

      First of all, that’s an awfully extreme accusation to make against any company or individual.  What’s your evidence for that?  Is it anything more than your own paranoid hatred of the companies involved?

      One of the companies involved in the CCDev program is Boeing (in fact, they are getting more money than any other CCDev participant).  Are you including Boeing among those that would sell our secrets to China in a nanosecond?  What about all the military systems Boeing already builds?  Why would they be more likely to sell NASA technology than all those systems?

      Anyway, there are strict laws in place that prevent companies from selling such technology to China, even if they wanted to, and there’s zero evidence any of these companies want to.

    • Anonymous says:
      0
      0

      Where is your proof that any of these private companies would sell the required technology–a very large amount of which likely falls under ITAR regs–to “a fascist state like China”?

  7. hamptonguy says:
    0
    0

    Double, triple, quadruple the NASA budget and one cannot be sure more would not just get flushed down the drain on rockets that never get built or spent on projects with enormous overruns like JWST.  Perhaps NASA could buy a coherent plan, a method of cutting down on the mountain of bureaucracy,  and some real leadership willing to make the tough decisions, inspire a workforce tired of planning and replanning, or be willing to walk if Congress wants to meddle.  NASA needs to prove itself as a leader in aerospace R&D and then ask for more money to do even greater things.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
      0
      0

      There are plenty of US companies who stand as examples of having “a coherent plan” and plenty of high-level executives with the capability to implement them for NASA (plenty of Lee Iacoccas).  Unfortunately, NASA management has become much more of a political animal than ever, and isn’t interested in being a “leader in aerospace R&D.”  I think NASA sees its primary goal these days as continuing to exist.  And some days it seems like a close race.  On the other hand, any seasoned executives with the experience and knowledge to turn NASA around are far too smart to take a job where your own people don’t want to listen and involves regularly going toe to toe with Congress.  My personal theory is that only a true believer or an idiot would take on the job of NASA Administrator, which boils down to someone from the aerospace world or a lawyer, so there aren’t many choices to pick from.

  8. Littrow says:
    0
    0

    I think both Johnson and Nixon were good judges of the American character and they were seeing NASA at the time of the height of its accomplishments and the attention paid to it by the American people. They came at it from two different perspectives, left and right wing, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. Both said they thought it reasonable for NASA to maintain a 1/2 of 1 percent budget. Its somewhat higher than what NASA is getting today though no where near double. 

    I think that if NASA delivers, like it once did, with programs like Shuttle in 1981, the American people might even be inclined to give more. On the other hand if NASA is seen as squandering what it gets because of inefficiencies and bureaucracies, then I don’t think anyone will need to worry about NASA getting any money at all. Maybe there would be a new agency  or maybe Congress would re-purpose FAA or DARPA or some other agency, just as NASA came from NACA. 

    It is going to take a major shake-up, a change of direction, real direction, a goal,  real leadership, and accomplishment. These things need to happen pretty quickly. These are things we have not seen from NASA in some time, other than a leadership direction to give the near term goals to the outside of NASA community. We are seeing the effect of NASA leadership as we speak, with today’s retirement of a Shuttle, and with a go for launch for a new commercially produced-not NASA produced- space vehicle. These are great things for the museum community and for commercial spaceflight. Now NASA needs not just to work on some great ideas but to show substantial progress. It is not something we’ve seen in NASA human space flight in a long time.
     

    • Steve Whitfield says:
      0
      0

      In all fairness, I think we’re all getting a little too loose with our labels.  We say “NASA” when addressing the problems, painting the entire agency with the same brush.  But really, it’s just HSF and a couple of major cost overruns in the other divisions that we’re primarily attacking.  I think the rest of the agency has done and continues to do quite well in a field that is typically very difficult and very difficult to plan. But because they have no “issues” on the same scale as SLS or JWST, they don’t get a lot of mention or discussion by comparison.

      Maybe it’s time to say, Hey, you guys in the rest of NASA, nice job!  Keep up the good work.

      • chriswilson68 says:
        0
        0

        I agree, it’s the HSF organization that’s clearly incompetent, not all of NASA.

        NASA has done very good work on many unmanned probes sent all over the solar system, and some good small-scale research and development programs.

  9. rlyon8 says:
    0
    0

    Private enterprise funded space flight could achive in fifty years what nasa could achive in five.