Americans Want A Space Program They Won't Pay For
5 facts about Americans’ views on space exploration, Pew Research Center
“Although they value the program and are proud of its achievements, Americans are reluctant to pay more for space exploration. Just 23% of Americans said the U.S. spends too little on space exploration, according the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey (GSS) conducted last year. About four-in-ten (42%) said the U.S. spends about the right amount, and 25% said the U.S. spends too much on space exploration. Americans were more likely to say the government is spending too little on areas such as education (70%) and health (57%).”
Keith’s note: Hmmm … this is going to be a problem if NASA wants to send astronauts on the #JourneyToMars given that a substantial increase in NASA’s budget – sustained over a long period of time – will be required to make this happen. One would hope that NASA would be a little more honest and open on this matter – if for no other reason to describe the coming need for budget increases and then lay the ground work and build some public sentiment for budget increases.
– Recent Space Poll: The Public is Not Always in Synch With Space Advocates (2015), earlier post
– Poll Suggests Public Concern Over Direction In Space (2011), earlier post
– New Gallup Poll Reveals Americans Strongly Support Space Exploration, Believe it Inspires Younger Generation (2008), earlier post
– Washington Post Poll on Space Spending (2009), earlier post
– New Poll Shows Support For Space Funding Cuts (2010), earlier post
–New Poll: Moon Yes, Mars No (2004), earlier post
Unfortunately people don’t really know how much is being spent on various government programs and have even less of an idea of how much of the allocated budget is wasted on activity totally unrelated to the publicly perceived purpose of the agency. Fortunately JPL and APL are a bit more efficient in their use of resources and carry out spectacular missions around the solar system, despite NASA. The net result is NASA is good (?)
Exactly. It’s not like people are paying attention. Budget numbers people may happen to come across are almost always taken out of context to serve the agenda of whatever politician/propagandist is distorting them.
Such discussions will endlessly be debated without resolve since most people are economically illiterate.
This is why we need to privatized space. I understand economics quite well and Congress is killing innovation. When you have space dollars looked at as jobs in my state/district – well that’s a problem. When NASA is mandated to do things it doesn’t want… we are all screwed.
Democrats and Republicans are to blame.
Exactly. There are no vegans in Congress. They all love pork.
That’s right. Government IS the problem. Let free enterprise free! Tear off those shackles!
I suspect most Americans were/are not aware of what they are paying for the space program.
The public is obviously misinformed about the likelihood of other goals being met-that more than 60% believe that astronauts will land on Mars by 2050 or that ordinary people would travel in space by 2050, or that there will be long term space colonies in 50 years.
The US is not on track to accomplish any of these. There is no plan or goal for any of these (maybe Americans thought Chinese astronauts would attain these goals?)
The bottom line is that Americans need to be better informed. NASA does not seem to be accomplishing this.
You give the American people too much credit. After all the hype surrounding the Orion test flight, many Americans believe a trip to Mars is eminent within the next few years (example: check out the AT&T commercial that asks where you’ll be when humans set foot on Mars — they show people using present day tablets and cell phones watching the Mars landing).
How can it when its education and outreach budget keeps getting slashed?
True dat. That budget almost gets cut each and every year.
What do you blame the public? Public support for NASA has little impact on NASA’s budget, its Congress and the Executive Branch that determine NASA’s fortune.
The Executive Branch cares little about what the public wants unless it recognizes an overwhelming trend (i.e.demonstrations…), then jumps on the band wagon. And members of Congress only listen to those in their district who will help them get re-elected. So as space advocates have learned, or should have learned by now, public support for space is a not a factor in American space policy, not even during Project Apollo.
http://www.space.com/10601-…
There is another option. NASA could finally recognize its budget will remain where it is, there will never be another Project Apollo bubble, and get smarter about spending it. $18 billion is not chicken feed, it is a substantial amount of money if used properly.
For example, dropping the SLS in favor of Falcon Heavy. Replacing the ISS with leased space on a Bigelow Aerospace Habitat. And downsizing by reducing infrastructure. Closing Glen, MSFC, Goddard, Ames, Stennis, Wallops and Langely and consolidating at KSFC, JSC amd JPL would make financial sense. Also developing a public-private partnership for a lunar return to leverage private funds as was the case with communication satellites.
And it is also time to forget going to Mars as the expensive sideshow it has been. NASA needs to recognize it will never receive the funding for an Apollo style mission to it. There will be no great savior elected to rain money down on NASA as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did. The Cold War is long over and any new Cold War will be very different in terms of its geopolitical competitions.
But NASA won’t move beyond the Project Apollo model of flagship programs. And it won’t be allowed to downsize because of Congressional politics, so it will drift as it has been. But don’t blame the public for the political no-win situation NASA has found itself in, as the public has never been a factor in space policy. The buck starts and stops in the Beltway.
Just imagine what Musk could do with a no strings attached 18 billion dollars a year. 🙂
We would be Space faring people in no time flat.
I can see where this perspective comes from. But my biggest worry about private commercial space (which I still do support) is: How will a commercial entity (like SpaceX) and their investors react to their first crew tragedy/loss of life? Would it be ruinous? Given the relative rarity of space flight, it doesn’t yet have large sample safety statistics on it’s side (compared to, say, the airline industry). To date, crewed space flight has about a 4% death rate.
A public space program can put on a brave face and talk about soldiering on as a people. But a private company? I’m not sure the stakeholders for that would be as romantic.
History shows that the private sector soldiers on.
It is the public programs that cower and quit do to fear of losing public support.
The problem is more likely to be the government investigations and regulations than the private firm.
Also remember, there is only one NASA but there are many private firms, so if one fails others are there to take its place. That is how commercial markets work.
Virgin Galactic is now on hold because of its accident, but XCOR and Blue Origins are moving forward as they were not part of it.
No science, that’s what.
We didn’t explore and develop the American West for science, but science benefited greatly from it. That same will be true with a shift in focus to the economic development of space.
Or to put it clearly, imagine how much research would have been done on the dinosaurs of the American West if the fossils had to be hauled by ox cart to Boston and New York for study, instead of being shipped on the railroad. Or if you have to haul the equipment to build observatories on the mountains of the west by ox cart. Unfortunately space is still in the ox cart stage of transportation.
NASAs had 50 years to build cars.
Instead they build bigger ox carts.
Well, it’s not going to happen, but, hypothetically, what about shifting some money to scientific research with the requirement that the launches fly on a commercial launch provider? That would give companies like SpaceX an anchor tenant and fund space.science.
All NASA robotic launches are already flying on commercial vehicles and have since the 1990’s with the exception of ones that were designed for the Space Shuttle before the Challenger Accident. The Military also uses commercial providers.
The Space Shuttle was the last government owned launch system to see service. The SLS however is following in its tracks as a government owned system.
Or, alternatively, NASA human spaceflight can finally get serious about reforming its incredibly expensive traditional way of doing business, to allow it to actually accomplish interesting human exploration on the mere nine billion a year it currently gets.
Seriously. Tens of billions to develop space transport systems in-house just doesn’t cut it any more, now that COTS has done it for hundreds of millions and Commercial Crew is near doing it for low billions (after a large dollop of trad NASA process was added back in.)
NASA can waste another few decades hoping in vain for a second money-is-no-object Apollo moment, or wake up, smell the coffee, give up its massively bureaucratic in-house systems development habit, and start giving the taxpaying public some actual human space exploration for their money again.
I honestly do not care which approach you suggest – NASA is not going to have enough money to develop things itself – or procure services from the private sector.
I don’t completely agree. A lot of NASA’s elements, out of necessity, do an awful lot with a much smaller amount of dollars, than what human space flight gets. Human space flight seems to be very inefficient. There are several corrections needed: NASA needs to go back to its ways of the 1960s, where their engineers spend a lot of their time building prototype hardware before they hand hardware off to contractors. NASA needs to be far more efficient and effective in their contracting methods, which might include more ‘commercial’ capped costs like Space X and OSC. Look at those costs compared with Boeing or Lockheed on CST and Orion. That also includes doing a better job in other areas, like their public affairs. And NASA needs to do a far better job educating the public. Their current methods of social media and more common media has not worked in decades. If they do not educate the public then it almost doesn’t matter what NASA does or does not do, They won’t get more money and no one will care because no one will know what NSA is or isn’t doing.,
Apollo style development was not cost efficient. It was the exact opposite because the mantra at the time was “waste anything but time”. We are not in a Cold War fueled Space Race anymore. Wishing for the “glory days” of Apollo to return is the opposite of productive.
Keith – I don’t want to make you mad or pick a fight with you here. Seriously, I don’t. But I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that changing the way NASA spends a huge chunk of its Exploration funding, doing space systems development and operations, in a way that on recent evidence offers from 5x to 20x savings, still won’t allow it to do serious exploration on current funding?
Say for the sake of argument that space systems development and operations consume 60% of NASA’s human spaceflight expenses, and very conservatively that by the time NASA has finished “embracing and extending” the COTS process the savings are down to 3x. That’s still 40% of NASA’s human spaceflight funding stream freed up by a wholesale change to that approach, or well over $3 billion a year in effectively new money. (Or thereabouts, yes, we could argue the assumptions – though I think the actual savings could be much higher, depending on the degree to which traditional NASA practices can be fended off.)
New money, moreover, that can be spent on 3x (or more) cheaper space systems to support and carry out exploration missions.
Now, I’d be the first to agree that getting there from here is a HUGE job. I and many others have been working a good part of our adult lives to cover what I’d guess is maybe the first 20% of the way, and I’m often amazed we’ve even gotten that far.
But you seem to be saying NASA still wouldn’t be able to accomplish any worthwhile exploration with the savings after such a radical reform is accomplished. If I’m not simply mistaking your meaning, I’d like to hear more about why.
NASA does not have the budget now – or one proposed for the future – to pay for any Humans to Mars mission – regardless of how they do it in-house or commercially.
OK, sounds like we have a fundamental difference in assumptions.
Me, I think the job could be done for a politically realistic fraction of the current ~$9 billion a year (roughly half its overall budget) NASA gets for human spaceflight, over the course of a decade or so. Given, of course, management structures and practices VASTLY different than what’s prevailed over the past few decades.
What do you think it would take in time and budget? Under the current arrangements, and also perhaps under some degree of reform you think realistic?
You “think”…. but you dispute my comments? Sounds like no one has any data.
Keith – the original assertion was yours. “NASA does not have the budget now – or one proposed for the future – to pay for any Humans to Mars mission – regardless of how they do it in-house or commercially.”
Now you’re declining to support it with data by saying it sounds like nobody has data? Not exactly the most convincing of arguments.
Honestly, and again utterly without any intention of offending you, that sounds to me more like despair than a reasoned position.
Meanwhile, I’ll make a quick, and very parametric, stab at the ballpark numbers I base my position on. (I’ve “thought” about this quite a bit, applying reason to the available facts – I recommend the practice highly.)
Baseline assumption for all these scenarios: NASA gets, and will continue to get, roughly nine billion a year in 2015 dollars for human spaceflight, absent a significant political shift. (Such a shift seems far more likely for the downside than the upside, FWIW. NASA does need to be careful.)
– First, the default Old NASA approach, loosely based on the recent JPL Mars mission plan. NASA spends roughly half the $9G on Station through 2024, the other half on SLS and Orion plus whatever modest additional Mars prep is possible with what’s left over. Then starting in 2025, the entire $9G goes to Mars, with orbital mission 2033ish and landing 2037ish. Nominal cost, $4.5G x 9 years, plus $9G x 13 years, or about $160 billion.
Given the history of such NASA projects, my assumption is that at best, this might take five more years and 50% more money than planned. That’s about $3G a year more from 2016 through 2042, a 33% annual Human Spaceflight budget increase, and a project total of $240 billion.
(This is, by the way, in the same ballpark as the impending Constellation budget shortfalls which doomed that program.)
I suspect we agree that’s not going to happen, and thus such a project is doomed from the start.
– Second, the Modest NASA Reforms scenario. Assume the current Old-NASAization of the original COTS approach continues to the point where spaceflight systems development and operations cost 1/3 the traditional Old NASA levels. Assume further such spaceflight systems development and ops costs are ~60% of the current overall cost of NASA human spaceflight, with the other ~40% going to general project management and overhead. Assume further that mild NASA reform (such as is already being implemented in various other parts of the agency) can cut management & overhead by 25% from current levels.
The overall cost of the project then drops by 50%, from $240 billion to $120 billion.
Assume the same $4.5G/year available through 2024, then assume after that a scaleback of NASA’s Station commitment (between added efficiencies there also, plus commercial transition) so that 2/3rds of the annual $9G, or $6G/yr, is available for our notional Mars project.
We reach the $120 billion project total (and presumably Mars) within reasonably politically plausible annual budgets in 2037.
– Third, Major NASA Reform scenario – the one I’m working for: The current Old NASAization of Commercial Crew is recognized as an error, and partially rolled back in future such that spaceflight systems development and operations costs drop 10X from Old NASA levels. More serious NASA management reforms are also initiated, such that project management & overhead drop 50% from current levels. Overall Mars project cost drops to 26% of current levels, or $62 billion. At $4.5G/year through 2024 then $6G/yr thereafter, we reach Mars in 2028.
This is never going to happen and you know it. It requires long term planning, stable budgets, and discipline that the agency has never been able to demonstrate internally or rely upon externally. Hence my initial post.
I know no such thing.
A stable budget they’ve got – they’ve been getting roughly $7G-$9G/yr inflation-adjusted for human spaceflight for the last forty years.
There’s been no lack of long-term plans either – at NASA these are a dime a dozen. Just not GOOD plans.
Discipline to make and stick to a long-term plan that’ll work WITHIN THAT BUDGET, yes, that’s been in short supply. A major part of NASA has spent forty years stubbornly assuming the Apollo money-taps will come back on and planning on that basis. Over and over they come up with new systems that can’t be paid for any other way, and over and over either Congress, the White House (or both) shoots them down and says try again.
No, that isn’t ending easily. It won’t end at all (unless it finally destroys NASA human spaceflight entirely) absent external pressure.
Despair is neither an argument nor a plan.
You have just explained why this will never happen.
Certainly absent external pressure this will never happen.
Or rather, never finish happening. It’s already started. Else why would we have the example of the COTS program to point to? And why the reaction against COTS that’s delaying and increasing costs for Commercial Crew?
The fight is on. The outcome is far from certain. Either way, it’s far from certain – which is a major advance from where we were ten years ago.
I agree, which is why its time for NASA to forget about sending humans to Mars and work towards goals that are achievable within future projected budgets.
Which means the private sector just may need to do it their self.
Your statement makes no sense Keith. Procuring services from the private sector is more than a little bit cheaper, it’s at least an order of magnitude cheaper when you do a fair accounting and add in development costs.
It’s literally been 40 years since the last Apollo capsule flew. The US aerospace industry simply does not need cost plus style contracts to fly capsules anymore. NASA solved those hard problems decades ago. It’s time for NASA to move on to new harder problems and leave the “easy” stuff to commercial contracts which pay out once services are rendered.
Didn’t NDT try this before? He went on Comedy Central and before Congress. No change.
No one is going to support a giant Expendable rocket program when everyone in the world knows we have the tech to make space affordable.
Average Joe Taxpayer knows NASA is lieing to them.
Polls show that the average Joe Taxpayer barely knows which end of a rocket is supposed to point at the sky.
They don’t need to know much about rockets to see nothing much develop in 50 years
The keyword is progress
That’s just another example of Average Joe Taxpayer not having a clue about what’s going on. Tremendous strides in rocket propulsion technology have been achieved over the decades.
Then Spaceflight should be much cheaper and safer/ better?
But it’s not?
You can argue either way for all three of those criteria.
Also, I think it’s odd that you jumped away from “progress” immediately to cost, safety, and “better” whatever that means.
What Average Joe Taxpayer actually knows is that he expects NASA to do cool things in space that make him feel good (well, less bad) about paying those taxes.
Pluto this week is a prime example.
The political danger is that Average Joe Taxpayer is starting to realize that it’s been a long time since NASA did anything that cool in space involving astronauts. Hence the current enthusiasm for Mars, both from low-attention taxpayers and from the people who know they must NOT lose the current (somewhat diffuse and innumerate, but real) support of those taxpayers.
If NASA heads off on a thirty-year Mars plan based on business-as-usual, my take is that they’re toast. Diffuse and innumerate taxpayer feelgood support will at some point stop feeling so good, in the face of the inevitable continued decades of delays and stumbles.
Agreed with DTARS comment on funding giant EXPENDABLE rockets. The public isn’t quite as dumb as some space enthusiasts think. There is much excitement over the SpaceX attempts at landing a first stage. It’s an exciting baby step along the path to dramatically lowering launch costs.
Doing the same failed thing over and over again is insanity. Large expendable heavy lift launch vehicles are a technological and economic dead end, and the taxpayers are smart enough to get that.
Here’s a question for you. How much of the general public do you think is excited about the SpaceX landing attempts?
I’m not sure. But, I do know it’s gotten some airplay on TV and has shown up on several “mainstream” news outlets online. So, it’s getting quite a bit of attention in the press. Not as much as New Horizons flying by Pluto, for sure, but it’s getting more press than say, the DOD just launched another GPS satellite. And people “need” their GPS, so we know that’s important to them.
So it’s gotten some attention, but how many people are -really- excited, who follow space news on a daily basis rather than being just momentarily interested?
I think the number is far lower than you might expect, since we are the ones who are really excited. I’d guess the total number of people who have a continuing interest in and who are generally enthusiastic about space is less than a million in the USA. Sure, everyone has heard of NASA and some of the things they do, and they have an opinion about whether or not it’s worth it, but most people don’t truly care.
Why wouldn’t they? After all, the right has been braying for decades that the ‘government IS the problem’. Of course nobody trusts the government anymore. They have been completely vilified.
I recall an exhibit at the Air & Space Museum a couple of decades ago that included a similar survey’s results — and they, too, were about the same. Americans really do want faster, cheaper, better. Too bad it appears so hard to achieve more than to out of three.
Faster, better, cheaper is only a myth if the same procurement strategies and program management techniques are used. Commercial cargo and commercial crew are prime examples that faster, better, cheaper can be achieved. Pay for results, not cost-plus style contracts that have zero incentives for cost reductions.
Faster, cheaper, better in science introduced Small Explorers (SMEXes), with spacecraft are built by the PI or their contractor, and launch services provided by commercial providers (e.g. Orbital). The price has still managed to increase by about a factor of five over the last 19 years.
I think I’d like to see some documentation on that factor of five. I follow those programs fairly carefully, for professional reasons, and I don’t think the per-mission cost of a SMEX has gone up that much. Inflation at 3% per year is a factor of 1.75 over 19 years, but I don’t think that should be counted. You might be looking at the Explorer program as a whole. It stopped flying the student explorer line about 15 years ago, has been flying the medium explorer line at an increasing rate relative to small explorers, and, as of the last AO merged the two lines. They as also funding stand-alone instruments flying on non-NASA spacecraft.
It’s much higher than that.
“NASA’s allocation, on average, was estimated to be approximately 24% of the national budget”
http://www.thespacereview.c…
Multiple similar surveys have had similar results.
Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ this is a very important point and why the Pew poll looks so dismal. I ask this question of my friends all the time, “How much money do you think NASA gets every year and do you think that is more or less than the military?” I kid you not, the numbers I get are always in the hundreds of billions and they think that NASA gets about on par with the military (which is actually hundreds of billions). When I tell them NASA is a mere 18 bills, or more than 10X less than DoD, the response is generally, “Dude, NASA deserves more bills.” I’d advocate like others here that NASA’s PR campaign sucks. NASA is not allowed to actually “advertise”, but that shouldn’t stop a few space nerds with internet billions to do that work for NASA. Seriously Elon, when will you start running full page ads in the NY Times advocating for 1% of GDP for NASA? It’s all gonna trickle down eventually man.
Lost in Space
http://www.washingtonexamin…
The condescending tone of the space community when it talks among itself about “Joe Taxpayer” says a whole lot about why it’s been struggling to reach Joe Taxpayer and expand its budget over the last few years. Really folks, time to crawl off Olympus and re-read “It’ll take more than nerd cool,” Keith’s post from the other day. Joe Taxpayer isn’t somebody to fool into funding something he doesn’t understand. Rather, he’s an important partner in this journey (how much of SpaceX’s revenues are derived from U.S. taxpayer dollars?), and unless you can treat him like a partner – and not some kind of idiot – and show him why a wildly over-budget James Webb telescope, or a Europa interest, is in his interest, he’ll treat you with the disinterest you’ve earned. The burden of proof is on the space community, not the folks paying for it.
🙂
Ditto.
“Hmmm … this is going to be a problem if NASA wants to send astronauts on the #JourneyToMars
given that a substantial increase in NASA’s budget – sustained over a
long period of time – will be required to make this happen.”
Wishing for more money is delusional. In order to move forward, NASA needs to somehow ditch the albatross of SLS. Large government funded launchers funded by cost plus like contracts will never incentivize launch cost reductions.
Even considering its recent launch failure, SpaceX has demonstrated that launch costs can be significantly lowered. It’s time to buy launches on the open market and get NASA out of the launch vehicle business. It’s time for NASA to bypass Congress and start admitting to the American taxpayers that SLS is a turkey.
The American public has been conditioned to think for generations that space spending somehow keeps Granny from getting her medications, Johnny from getting a breakfast, and Suzie from getting her school textbooks. One can look at opinion editorials starting from the early 70s that enforce that mindset. This mindset, coupled with the erroneous assumption the NASA gets up 23% of the federal budget will forever keep NASA mired down.
In a way, NASA has been a victim of its own success. By nature, it must operate in the open. Its triumphs are there for the world to see. If NASA were just another mostly invisible, bureaucratic, service agency., there would be little hue and cry about its budget. It would operate unknown and uncared for.