Keith’s note: In the budget media telecon today I asked NASA CFO David Radzanowski what NASA is spending on education in 2017. As is always the case, NASA can never tell you exactly what it spends on education – or what “education” means. Their budget charts talks about $100 Million in 2017 – a cut from $118 in 2016. But wait there’s more: $25 million for education from Astrophysics and another $6 million from Earth science. So NASA is actually spending $131 million on education in FY 2017 – not the $100 million shown on their chart. But this is only STEM education according to Radzanowski. When I asked Radzanowski what NASA’s total expenditure for education and outreach will be for 2017 he said “I don’t have that number”.
NASA never has that number – so they won’t get back to me on that because (again) they never now that number. They don’t know it on purpose (or at least they will never admit it). If they answer the question accurately about what is categorized as “education” then someone somewhere at OMB or in Congress will try and cut that item because it has been labeled as “education”. So things get hidden inside of budgets. As a result, no one will ever know what NASA actually spends on education activities. It is like this all over NASA.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

9 replies on “NASA Can't – and Won't – Say What They Spend on Education”

  1. These numbers do not seem to agree with Andrew Stofan’s numbers reported at the recent NAC meeting. Radz’ numbers appear to be several times higher.

  2. Isn’t this symptomatic of OMB/Congress oversight (or over-stepping, as the case may be), rather than NASA seeking to deceive the public?

  3. My guess is that a bunch of the “education” line item in the science portion is for graduate stipends or grad student use of instruments or data sets. And a bunch of the $100 million also.

    1. My guess is that is a mix of things at many levels. If I pay a student from a NASA grant, I certainly tell the University it is educational (that’s expected in performance reviews) but that might or might not end up in the annual report to NASA. The requirements are vague about that.

      There is also a fair amount of education-related work funded at the project and program level. That may or may not be clearly broken out in the budgets which end up at NASA HQ, especially the ones which reach the top floor. So I’m not shocked noone actually knows the total.

    2. Truth be known they just guess, make things up, collect some of the data, toss it out and if no one questions it then they can go home at 3:30 pm.

  4. Do we think the confusion is in the “outreach” end of the equation? That has to be an incredibly hard thing to calculate ROI for. As someone in private industry, I can tell you that no matter the budget, the outreach/education machine at NASA is one of the best. I’d happily take half of their budget/reach.

    1. NASA makes numbers up to claim that all of this stuff has an impact but when you ask where the numbers came from no one provides an answer.

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