Is A Giant Budget Boost In NASA's Future?
Trump said to propose roughly $3 billion NASA budget boost for 2021, TechCrunch
“President Donald Trump is set to request a budget of $25.6 billion for NASA for its fiscal 2021 operating year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. It’s looking for nearly $3 billion more than the $22.6 billion NASA had for its current fiscal year, and the bulk of the new funding is said to be earmarked for development of new human lunar landers. This represents one of the single largest proposed budget increases for NASA in a couple of decades, but reflects Trump’s renewed commitment to the agency’s efforts as expressed during the State of the Union address he presented on February 4, during which he included a request to Congress to “fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and first woman on the Moon will be American astronauts.”
I hope that pans out. That would be the biggest net budget increase for NASA in decades, and they need it.
Well, at lease someone is thinking about infrastructure 🙂
Is the ‘lander issue’ resolved, in favor of single-use, Apollo-style hardware? Or similar. Is the SpaceX model deemed too far out, or what?
It’s true that Starship hasn’t flown. But $hundreds of millions are booked on other systems yet to light a single rocket; I am thinking of Mr. Bezos’ efforts, but there are others.
This isn’t a pro-SX rant; just saying that there are alternatives in development that are radically different.
(And, here’s something different: Elon wondering if his big space ships could be assembled in the manner of oil/gas storage containers, a well-understood technology).
I don’t see much coverage of how Starship represents a seriously different system incorporating landers and habitats all rolled into one.
The discussion that should be had before $3B is spent. And before that $3B becomes $10B.
Yes, he wants to be able to build spacecraft in days or weeks, not years. If he succeeds he would completely undermine the old space firms like Boeing. Next thing he will be talking about is building satellites on assembly lines like automobiles… oh wait, he is already doing that with Starlink, isn’t he….
I wonder what the test plan is like for StarLink. Multi-spacecraft NASA missions (e.g. MMS) give each spacecraft the same care and attention. An alternative is to test the first one very heavily, to validate the design, and do minimal testing on the rest, to make sure they really were built just like the first one. I suspect SpaceX is following the later approach, and I’ll be interested to see if it makes any difference for reliability.
Given the large number it will be interesting to see what percentage fail. But then again with such a large number it may not matter if 3-4 percent fail, they will simply be replaced. As you have pointed out before it’s that last 5 percent that drive costs up.
“Elon wondering if his big space ships could be assembled in the manner of oil/gas storage containers, a well-understood technology).”
Robert Truax proposed that decades ago.
That’s a name I haven’t heard in some time.
I will be pleasantly surprised if he gets any of this, let alone having the budget cut! From some of the comments made by certain members of the House after approximately 5:00 PM EST yesterday, and since, it appears there are a number (majority???) of sore losers, who would like nothing better than to poke a certain gentleman in the eye, both figuratively and maybe literally. How better to do the former by refusing to appropriate the funds necessary to get anything done prior to November, and maybe afterward! I hope that is not the case. Just have to wait and see…
“than to poke a certain gentleman in the eye,”
Than to poke a certain criminal in the eye.
fixed it for you
If they don’t get a big boost like that I wouldn’t count on flags and footprints by 2028, let alone 2024.
I seriously doubt the current House of Representatives will pass that budget increase. Without it, a 2024 landing is just not going to happen. I’m not sure Mr. Trump will be as supportive if it’s clear he won’t be in office for the landing. And I’m also not comfortable with how the first woman on the Moon is being handled.
There are plenty of well-qualified women in the astronaut corps. If we just fly lunar missions, landing the first woman on the Moon is inevitable. She might not be the next American on the Moon, but if the selections are based entirely on merit, one of the next four would definitely be female. With the Shuttle program, there was some internal pressure to have a woman on an early flight. But in practice, they just got rid of the stupid requirements which kept women out of the astronaut corps, selected based on ability, and Dr. Ride ended up on the seventh flight (third after the Shuttle was declared operational.) Ms. Tereshkova on the other hand, was pretty obviously selected to let the Soviet Union set a “first”, and she’s never heard the end of that. Could we _not_ land the first woman on the Moon in a way which will make people say “…just because she’s a woman.”?
There is no way the house will pass a three billion increase and let it land in a single rice bowl at NASA, will be divided into a lot of bowls from planetary science and others.
I have doubts about a three billion dollar budget increase in the first place. But if it does happen, there are always ways to fiddle the bookkeeping. The recent RFI about lunar rovers mentioned they wanted the one for astronauts to be something the CLPS landers could deliver. CLPS lives in the Science Mission Directorate’s budget. So money allocated to science could be used to subsidize human lunar activities. To keep that sort of thing from happening would require unusually specific language in the appropriations bill.
That misses my point. I’m not objecting to diversity, or that the next astronauts on the Moon should be a diverse group (in more ways than just gender.) It’s a question of how to achieve that. I’m for having a diverse group of well-qualified candidates and just letting an unbiased selection and assignment process work.
The problem I have is with saying the _next_ astronaut to set foot on the Moon _will_ be a woman. That was a presidential order before we even know what the crew size would be, what their jobs would be, or if the mission commander or the geologist would be sitting closest to the hatch. In effect, it’s setting a high level requirement for gender to be the primary selection criteria. That bothers me for a whole lot of reasons.
I basically agree, but there’s the history of not one single woman having been among any of the original Mercury 7, the Gemini astronauts, or the Apollo astronauts.
It took until 2020, approximately 55 years since the first spacewalk, for two females to just happen to be assigned to the same spacewalk team. Consequently, in this modern day and age, there’s arguably a need for a proactive correction rather than perhaps waiting many years for a female astronaut to just happen to be selected.
Let’s say the first landing is in 2026 (delays are of course not unlikely). Then, depending on budget and SLS production rate, landings have been projected by some as likely to be conducted once every two years. If it takes until the 3rd or 4th mission until a woman just happens to be next up, we’ll be into the 2030s. Many women and many men who love them (ex. a father of a girl showing interest in STEM areas) won’t be cool with that.
Nevertheless, I also find it grating, this constant mention of “The first woman and next man on the Moon”. It’s an artificial selection criteria and, imo, a political one. Still, one could easily argue that it is time, especially with women constituting slightly greater than 50% of the population, greater than 50% of recent college graduates and nearly 50% of the workforce
Being proactive about diversity is a fine idea. But there are good and bad ways to do it. This “first woman and next man on the Moon” thing is high on my list of bad ways to do it. But I’m afraid some things really are a matter of time.
Consider a job which comes to mind because I work for a University. I have trouble imagining a dean or chancellor who is under fifty. There’s just too much in terms of past jobs and experience for someone younger to be well-qualified. That means just about everyone currently holding those jobs started high school in the early 1980s or before. When the educational system was, well, let’s say less encouraging about women interested in the physical sciences. That’s a source of a lack of diversity which will take time to go away.
But I also hope you’re wrong about the flight rates. I was thinking of a landing in 2025 (current plan plus one year of being behind schedule) and at least one per year. Less than that, and I can’t imagine some roles (e.g. lunar geologists) attracting applicants of any gender. It would just be too obviously a dead end career. Which might even fold back into diversity: Is there any gender difference in terms of willingness to devote your entire life to being an astronaut and taking a risk you’ll never getting into space?
But for NASA HSF has always had a political element, so its really nothing new…
Well, he did talk it up during his State of the Union address, which surprised the heck out of me.
When is the last time a President talked up NASA and manned space exploration during his SOTU? JFK? LBJ?
I didn’t listen to the speech, so I don’t know how much Mr. Trump said about space. Mr. Reagan, certainly did talk about NASA (as military space) in some of his State of the Union addresses. I think both Presidents Bush at least mentioned NASA once or twice. Actually, President Bush Jr. almost certainly did in the speech following the Columbia accident. And I think they’ve all included at least an occasional, throw-away sentence.
Actually for President Trump its the second time, last year he honored Buzz Aldrin and Apollo 11.
“In 2019, we also celebrate 50 years since brave young pilots flew a quarter of a million miles through space to plant the American flag on the face of the moon. Half a century later, we are joined by one of the Apollo 11 astronauts who planted that flag, Buzz Aldrin.
Thank you, Buzz. American astronauts will go back to space on American rockets.”
Also in President Trump’s first speech to the members of Congress in 2017 he stated.
“American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream. “
That’s all very vague. And even if true is not anywhere close to what Trump said during his SOTU.
Trump not only fully endorsed the 2024 NASA lunar polar landing goal, he also asked Congress to provide the extra funding NASA needs to achieve that goal. When is the last time any President did anything close to that?
Probably Mr. Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union speech. That’s when he announced plans for a major, US space station, then called “Freedom”, and asked Congress to fund it.
One the one hand, NASA wastes too much money already, as with the SLS. On the other hand, the acceleration of the Lunar landing to 2024 and the extra money that requires might be the fastest way to break the current stranglehold SLS has on NASA.
Additional money would be nice if it is spent wisely and on proven performers. There has been too much politics over the last 20 years; Boeing got a lot of money for CST and has not done well. Lockheed Martin has gotten a lot of money for Orion and not performed. People are counting on something called Gateway, a pure political contrivnce aimed at keeping money flowing in order to not lose face with internationals; and we only need it because we bought into an under-powered Orin based on a LEO ATV.
So..we rob social services to fund going to the Moon?
I don’t know if I can get on that train.
NASA’s budget is about 1/2% of the total federal budget, which represents about 1% of what the federal government spends on social programs. The return on investment for a dollar spent on NASA is about 8:1.
“A report by the Space Foundation estimated that activities related to space contributed $180 billion to the economy in 2005—more than eight times the department’s own budget”
https://www.nasa.gov/home/h…
Elimination of just 1% of the waste in social programs would represent all of NASA’s budget.
Per ‘The Balance’ on federal spending in 2019:
“The government expects to spend $4.746 trillion in 2020. Almost 60% of that pays for mandated benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—the mandatory spending category”
https://www.thebalance.com/…
The entire NASA budget is at best a rounding error in the budget that goes to social services. Also the two are not connected as they are in separate appropriation bills.
To put NASA’s budget in perspective, it seems the proposed budget also contains a cut for the Department of Defense. It was reported by the press as a very small one, only about 1%. But that $7.8 billion is also a third of NASA’s budget.