Could NASA's Budget be at its Lowest Level Since 1986?
House Committee Approves Smallest NASA Budget Since 1986, Planetary Society Blog
“The House Appropriations committee, apparently feeling nostalgic for the Karate Kid and warm leggings, just approved the smallest NASA budget (in terms of purchasing power) since 1986.
The subcommittee responsible for NASA’s budget approved $16.6 billion for the space agency in 2014. While SpaceNews reported this as the smallest budget since 2007, it’s actually much worse if you correct for inflation.”
Marc’s note: The caveat here is if the NASA Authorization Act of 2013, that the House Subcommittee on Space marked-up earlier this week, doesn’t change substantially. What the final Bill will look like is yet to be determined. But even when the Senate weighs in, it appears with the current Congress, and for at least the next few years, you can expect a lower NASA budget. I don’t see the White House expending political energy, to truly fight for NASA.
And they still want a third of the budget spent on SLS/Orion? Isn’t it time to focus on projects that have some chance of leading to sustained improvements in commerce? Congress is always ready to cut waste, except when it benefits them.
SLS/Orion get about $2.7B out of $17B per year, so that’s more like 1/6 rather than 1/3 of the entire NASA budget. We’ve spent over $10 billion on Orion already and it’s still 5 years from flying in any meaningful configuration. That’ll cost another $7 billion.
Don’t forget about the $10+Billion wasted on Ares I program.
…or the money spent on keeping facilities manned and running that will eventually support SLS.
What’s the point of funding NASA? You can’t fight terrorism with space shuttles! Fighting terrorism is more important than paltry ambitions like the future of humankind.
Now, for a laugh, why not look up the funding received by the NSA… and compare that to NASA budgets.
According to estimates, NSA’s budget is about $10B. In other words, NSA’s budget is $7B LESS than NASA.
The problem with NASA isnt how much money they get, it’s how little we get for the money its given.
I bet all ‘black’ (as in clandestine/secretive) U.S. budgets easily dwarf the NASA budget. Fact is more tax dollars were spent each year on providing air conditioning for U.S. military bases in Iraq then on NASA.
I do agree, however, that NASA no longer provides good value in human spaceflight.
Add all the NASA budgets from 1958 through ~ 2011 (normalized to FY 2007) and the sum is about equal to the DoD budget for 2011. NASA does a lot with its very small budget.
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The Apollo generation is long gone. The contractor base that NASA rode on is shedding experienced engineers while staying just this side of age discrimination suits. Both groups retain professional Powerpoint wranglers and requirement monkeys galore. That’s where the tens of billions with a ‘b’ dollars will go.
Mabe the House committee should read the papers at the Committee on Human Spaceflight: http://www8.nationalacademi…
One by Dr. Hum Mendell is particularly good-says that NASA gets more money than any other space agency world wide but is able to do little with it; points out how the space station took 20 years-actually the paper is in error there-it really took 30 years, and then when they got to the finish line they’d forgotten to make plans to use it. Says that NASA suffers from a crisis of timidity-can’t quite figure out what it needs to do or how to do it. Calls the asteroid mission a waste of a lot of money withe absolutely no potential to actually reach fruition. Mendell was with NASA for his entire career; a knows of what he speaks.
“Space…the Final Frontier” means we’re at a dead end.
I think what the bottom line is going to have to look like is that NASA needs to close down one or more centers.
There is no Apollo program, no shuttle program and even if SLS moves forward it is mostly engineered and completely built by contractors.
The fiscal reality of 2013 is NASA or the U.S.A. just doesn’t need or can afford 9 NASA centers and NASA can no longer justify keeping them open.
Consolidation and realignment is neccessary!
I believe it is deeper than that. The agency is being “wound down” It will be split/merged when the government is forced to do a major redesign once we are out of this recession. You can already see part of it being prepared for merging into a “commercial” flight agency, and part being merged into a government “r&d activity that produces jobs” type agency. Manned missions to asteroids… pfft….. give me a break.
The problem is that the unique facilities at each centre that are expensive to reproduce were deliberately spread out across as many different centres as possible precisely to prevent them being easily merged.
You’d need a long term consolidation plan to ensure that new facilities are always moved to a set of core centres, until you can close the secondary centres. But that gives you a decade or more of people shouting at you, and probably raised costs, before you see a single cent in savings from closures. No politician is going to vote for that, which is why the strategy works so effectively.
If the US is really to lead in space again we really need to
look at what NASA centers will be high value in the next decade. Which centers have led the way in innovation,
efficient designs, and partnerships; which centers are struggling to catch up; and which centers are just plain struggling ?
There may also be a center or two that can be reassigned to an agency like DoD or DoE in whole or in part.
As for JPL, they certainly have talent and therefore shouldn’t
be afraid of a little competition as a totally independent organization.
We are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the once grand US Space Program is gone. All the talk about fantastic schemes for exploration are simply verbose rhetoric of the talking heads in Washington. We can’t even fund science education in schools. How do we explore space?
Can’t even fund science education in schools? The generations that gave you the “grand” US Space Program had far less funding (adjusted) than what is spent today. The US spends far more than most other nations on education, military, r&d, pretty much everything with a disproportionate payback.
The mission problem at NASA is political, not technical ability. The fiscal problem at NASA is political as well. Perhaps there is value in shuttering a NASA center – there are several centers that are political and do little more than manage. We could start there.
This makes my brain hurt. I see two ads, one Werner von Braun Memorial Symposium “Bringing Exploration Forward.” And the other is Spaceref Career Center “now open to post jobs.” Along with this article about low NASA budget.
Perhaps rather than rely on guvmint money to conquer the solar system, get it privately? Yes, it takes a lot of capital. Borrowing a line from Dennis Wingo’s book, “think of what having access to and rights over a billion kilos of platinum would do for your corporate portfolio.”