Space Is A Non-issue in Presidential Elections
The 2016 Presidential Candidates’ Views on NASA and Space Exploration, Gizmodo
“Want to get to Mars? Well, NASA needs money to do it, and the president, along with Congress, mostly calls the shots. But NASA has been consistently underfunded over the last decade, and only saw its budget restored to healthier levels in 2016, when Congress carved out $19.3 billion for the agency. With missions to Mars and Jupiter on the horizon, and ambitions of curbing US dependency on Russian launches to the ISS, NASA’s no doubt hoping that the next president keeps the money flowing.”
Keith’s note: Space is just a blip on the political radar. Rarely, if ever, has it had any influence on a presidential election whatsoever – and then, it was fleeting and usually on late night comedy shows. Nor is it likely to change during this election. Besides, whatever you hear during the campaign will be revised and reinterpreted after the election. The candidates forget the issue 2 minutes after they answer a question about it.
Nothing on the horizon suggests that there will be a large increase in NASA’s budget. Nor is anyone really targeting NASA for drastic cuts. Given the large commitments the agency is already in the middle of, and the prospect of flat budgets, it is unlikely that there will be any seismic shifts. As for the #JourneyToMars – absent a large infusion of money (again, not likely) the current pay-as-you-go, we-don’t-need-a-plan approach is simply not going to get us to Mars any sooner.
The most that space advocates should hope for after the dust settles is that the agency will be held more accountable for its performance and that some budgetary and policy stability will be injected into things already underway so as to make them progress more efficiently.
Kicking The Can Down the Road to Mars, earlier post
Kicking the can down the road indeed.
Unfortunately this will not change until they (politicians and the general public) need NASA. And even more unfortunate, it will likely be some cosmic event that will potentially threaten Earth, by which time we will have zero time to do anything about it.
(man I have been watching to much xfiles)
Well considering if a candidate were to visit a NASA facility and then have a “clown picture” taken like the one above, yes I can see how candidates steer clear of NASA. Or when they speak, they will get flamed on the forums (and gives juicy attack material for their opponents).
What they say is too vague to trust. Even if it is specific and you can’t trust it, Presidents don’t control NASA funding anyway. That’s controlled by Congress and they make pork out of it.
Unless and until the US people see value coming from NASA, there is no reason for anyone to support NASA; certainly not anymore than they support it now. NASA does a poor job of educating the public. NASA’s focus on social media means only thousands even hear about most of what is being done. On rare occasion, like last year’s Pluto flyby, do more people hear about it and then the story of how people are involved and where money is spent is not widely known. Education has been cut back. Outreach is almost nonexistent. News distribution is severely curtailed in a system that is mostly dependent on selective tweets or Facebook postings.
as the old saw goes.. support is a mile wide and an inch deep
Exactly, although that in of itself is an improvement over what it used to be (back in the 1960s, a majority of the public was in favor of cancelling the Moon shot).
“Nothing on the horizon suggests that there will be a large increase in NASA’s budget.”
NASA doesn’t need an increase in budget. It needs an attitude adjustment, to quote an inflammatory country singer.
There’s a huge elephant living out in Hawthorne showing what can be done with focus and smart thinking. And while it is true that NASA’s portfolio is indeed deeper and wider than SpaceX’ singular mission, the point remains that, as our genial host likes to say, ya don’t need a semi to get milk from 7-11.
One has to wonder what some of the outside rocket boys could actually do with a couple billion a year- money NASA has been spending like water on SLS.
Food for thought.
Actually better to say that CONgress needs the attitude adjustment.
True enough. But internal to NASA, people too often find that what congress wants is what they want too, reinforcing and happily executing a bad order.
Nominally the President picks the NASA Administrator, but, in effect, the Senate does. They inform the Executive branch their pick won’t fly and they “suggest” who can be approved. Just like Bolden was not President Obama’s choice, he wanted someone else and he ended up with Bill “Monster Rocket” Nelson’s pick. The Senate has always controled the top tiers of NASA management because they have to power to confirm. NASA is the animal of Congress.
“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Do you understand?” – Captain Jack Sparrow
LOL. Jack Sparrow sounds like the SLS and Orion projects…so funny.
Or, possibly, “There are no problems in this command, only opportunities.” Attributed to Gen. Curtis LaMay, while in charge of SAC.
“there’s a very large portion of the American public, perhaps 30 or 40 %, who absolutely HATE”
Interesting figures that I haven’t seen. I wonder if you recall the source?
I don’t think they hate it at all – they just don’t really want to spend the money on it. It’s in this set of polls from 2014. Americans have a positive view on human spaceflight (even more so than folks back in the 1960s and 1970s), but about 30% want further cuts to the programs.
There will always be about 30% of the public who are limited in their thinking. Time to recognize that, and ignore it.
Actually if 70% don’t disapprove that makes it a very popular program. Can’t think of a single issue in modern America that would garner approval ratings higher than that.
On the other hand there are other issues with similar approvals that simply do not get off the ground (this isn’t partisan, folks, just an example): gun registration stands out as one issue quite popular that won’t happen.
Was that the study where people who wanted spending on NASA “cut”, wanted it “cut” to a level that was 5-10 times what NASA actually gets? Because people thought NASA received about a quarter of the Federal budget.
When faced with a goal, such as reducing the federal debt, I find surveys tend to confirm a certain wisdom of crowds. Unfortunately, a politician in today’s poor discourse gets zero brownie points for saying lets split the difference (cuts here or there, tax increases here or there).
Usually what I’ve seen in these surveys is that the DoD takes the big budget cut, and tax increases on the wealthier rise to the topas well, while things like getting rid of the EPA do not. I’d suspect that’s good for NASA, not being where anyone goes for too much money – there not being much there in the first place relative to other spending.
Some of the more curious surveys I’ve seen on this point are:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010…
https://www.nationaljournal…
A lot of NASA’s problem lies within NASA. NASA is extremely wasteful of its resources, dollars and people. Several years ago Congress wanted to know why its direction to make the ISS a National Lab did not seem to be going anywhere. Some significant payloads wanted to fly on ISS but their sponsors concluded that it was far too expensive and too time consuming to work with the ISS Program. Since then, for several years, there has been a task force looking at the inefficiencies of the ISS program and they concluded that about 75% of the program’s integration effort was redundant, often conflicting and wasted between different ISS organizations. The different ISS organizations were competing to collect the same information and perform the same integration functions. I think its great NASA has now realized they have a problem, and are going to try and fix this-but it comes 15 years since ISS first had a crew, and 20 years since the first payloads were being integrated on ISS. Integrating payloads was not something that was new to ISS. NASA has been flying payloads on their manned spacecraft since Mercury. So why didn’t they understand what needed to be done? At $3 billion a year, just think of the frustration, wasted effort and wasted dollars. If you apply this model to other parts of the NASA program, you know why NASA is not succeeding.
You have hit the nail on the head.
Look no further than NASA’s budget and its allocation
– Human Exploration Operations $8,510 million
$4,506 for Exploration and $4,004 for Space Operations
– Space Technology $725 million which is forced to support
upgrades to ISS and Exploration elements
– Aero $571M ==> You get what you pay for.
A lot of the problem is in those organization titles. Human Exploration Operations-very little operations going on that have anything to do with exploration. Why so much money going into ops? Why so relatively little going into technology when NASA is supposed to be a technology R&D organization? I wonder if it has anything to do with all those operations people in charge, beginning with Bolden, the AA, virtually every manager throughout the system?
I don’t see designating the ISS as a national lab would change anything. Part of the difficulty is that there really is not much funding for developing ISS payloads. Costs have improved significantly to the point where universities can do it for $50K or so, but they can’t get the $50K. I agree that research adn technology funding is inadequate, but that is controlled by Congress.
All in all, I think the campaigns’ neglect of space is an excellent thing, assuming it continues.
Playing a larger role in the campaigns runs a real risk of space exploration becoming a politicized football where one side can make bad space policy part of their program. And then if that party gets elected…?
It’s an asymmetrical situation: the downside is bigger than the upside. Thus neglect (so long as it’s benign) is preferable. Besides nobody votes for a presidential candidate because of his or her space policy. C’mon!
The proportion of single-issue voters in modern America is truly stunning. Just sayin’.
There are folks, particularly on the right, that will eat their young, politically speaking, over a few issues.
Single-issue voters are about evenly split, left and right, as far as I can see. But space isn’t that big of a single issue for most voters, left or right.
Thanks for pointing out what might be blinders on my part. I haven’t seen research on this type of question. Could be interesting.
“Arthur C Clarke and Werner von Braun and Willy Ley wrote serious books”
And also the famous Colliers magazine series and Walt teaming up with those guys above to provide cartoonists to illustrate to the general public what space travel will become.
There is this website “Rocketpunk” retro future like steampunk (I’m too lazy to find the link) which stated back in 1940s and 1950s it was envisioned there will be lots of people in space to manage weather and communication stations in orbit along with orbiting telescopic platforms that look both at earth and into space. Article went on about all these people will be working on the McGuffinite (the Alfred Hitchcock term). But along comes NASA which ruined those plans when they were able to replace all these people with just a few kg of electronics. bye bye McGuffinite.
Some of that stuff in back then is fascinating, we didn’t know enough of the planets so these were natural for movies like Queen of Outer Space [Venus] and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And I do think many people were excited about spaceflight back then in spite of its military beginnings. At that time you can easily get an airplane ticket to fly across the oceans or continent. Just 20 or 30 years before, very small percentage of people rode in airplanes. So 20 to 30 years from now (or in 50s/60s) we will have Orion (the Pan Am space liner).
Fast forward to now, not many people are excited about NASA (most are just working smucks that becoming an astronaut is as distance as becoming a superhero like Spiderman). But wait, a lot of people get excited about New Space because they might just have a shot at getting to go to space.