The Public Apparently Wants To Defund NASA
Keith’s note: according to “What government programs should be slashed? NASA nears top of list, poll finds“ in the Miami Herald: “In the latest Marquette Law School Poll, 63% of respondents said they would be willing to reduce spending on NASA and its space program to shrink the federal budget deficit. Meanwhile, just 37% said they would not be willing to cut it. And just 5% said sending astronauts to Mars or back to the moon is a major priority, while 39% said this is important, but not a top concern. A majority, 56%, said it should not be a priority at all.” (deep sigh) NASA has touched the sun, visited every planet in our solar system, has spaceships traversing interstellar space, and has telescopes that look back toward the dawn of the universe – yet NASA Public Affairs and other communications and outreach efforts at the agency consistently fail to convey these awesome, exciting accomplishments to the public. Only NASA could make America’s unparalleled accomplishments in space exploration so boring that such a large portion of the public wants to cut space funding. Ad Astra y’all.
20 responses to “The Public Apparently Wants To Defund NASA”
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“NASA Public Affairs and other communications and outreach efforts at the agency consistently fail to convey these awesome, exciting accomplishments to the public.”
This is the problem with the current public perception of NASA, there isn’t enough self-promoting to engage and show the accomplishments and how that impacts the betterment of everyone. It feels the the general public just isn’t aware any longer. They need to show what can be done with the current “pennies” NASA gets, and how much more could be done with ADDITIONAL funding.
It seems like NASA PR needs to hire some talent from someplace like Disney’s advertising department.
agree with everything except the Disney comment – they have had a ton of PR ‘challenges’ over the past decade or more.
It isn’t that NASA has failed to excite people. Well, maybe the youngest generations that seriously just want toys.
NASA now contends with the resurgence of Flat Earth thought thanks to people/organizations like Eric Dubay, Phuket Word, Great Mountain Publishing, and myself. So the public looks at the list of “NASA has touched the sun, visited every planet in our solar system, has spaceships traversing interstellar space, and has telescopes that look back toward the dawn of the universe.”
And the public asks, “But what if they didn’t? Wouldn’t that be akin to paying for a mermaid at the circus?” All of those things are effectively money pulled away from just giving the poorest 25% of taxpayers an extra $300 refund every year (the $25 billion spent on NASA divided by 1/4 of the total US population). You know, that extra money could push someone at the threshold of poverty just over the line, and it’s done without government spending anything.
OK so why is a country like India with substantially more people in poverty so enthusiastic about space!
The underlying problem is that people don’t understand how insignificant NASA’s budget is, relative to government spending. You could abolish NASA altogether and not make a dent in the deficit.
The 2025 NASA budget was $24.8 billion, while the budget deficit was $1.8 trillion. So, completely abolishing NASA would shave the deficit down by… 1%
At one point in the 2000s, the US paid more than the entire NASA budget JUST to air condition tents in Iraq/Afghanistan.
When asked how much of the federal budget NASA is, most people grossly overestimate. When told what it really is, they are surprised.
I would also think that the Mars answers are no doubt influenced by President Trump’s support for it and Elon Musk’s strong and outspoken desire to send people to Mars.
>Musk’s strong and outspoken desire to send people to Mars
This will be the single thing that will kill Artemis program to return to the moon. Just like all other programs where the main goal is Mars (always 20 years into the future) and the moon takes a back seat and later cancelled.
Keith, I can’t remember who, but someone in my current media diet made the sobering assertion that we have essentially become too dumb for democracy culturally.
The current attitudes toward space are a casualty of the same phenomenon. We are too inwardly focused as citizens to remember the great things we can achieve when we reach together. Consider the culture of fear that grips at the heart of one of our political parties (and the current administrator of the agency). It is hard to imagine a place for the achievements of the past given the circumstances.
I am thinking where everyone talks about success of Apollo program, besides goal to beat the Soviets to the moon, it was also to demonstrate the political and technological abilities of the the US. However, these days US is a different country than before so considerable doubt if we could ever do something like land someone on the moon and bring them back safely.
Comparing monies and percentages doesn’t seem to resonate with most people unless they understand finances (most do not). I think it comes down to having a strong PR but not politicized or fluff, but then PR dept of NASA does not have strong budget and also there are so many restrictions on what can be disclosed and when. There are all sorts of requirements for NASA websites even to type and size of font and spacing between lines. To post something exciting is as much work as preparing for entrance exam to a top university. Not surprising much is “rinse repeat” as that has been previously approved.
“There are all sorts of requirements for NASA websites even to type and size of font and spacing between lines.”
This is an odd complaint. Everybody who publishes something in any professional setting has to take care to adhere to style guidance. On a website this isn’t very difficult, formatting should be set by something like CSS and completely opaque to the content creators. They could write it in Word with Comic Sans size 90 font if they want, it’ll just be copied and pasted as text. Size and spacing are fundamental aspects of producing something readable and it’d be odd to me if those aren’t controlled.
That said, this would speak to the continuing importance of trained webmasters and technical editors, something I know is a problem in all industries. The knee jerk reaction in industry and government is to cut those roles and have their work carried out by the people actually writing or uploading to the website. They may consider those jobs inefficient without it occuring to them that one low level tech writer can save 40 rocket scientists hours of labor when it comes to formatting and editing. Instead we waste the technical experts’ time and and still produce worse products.
On the contrary. I fully understand that 1% or so is NASA. We can also remove
What does going to the moon or Mars do for a poor person who has to work all day at the company because they cannot afford a vacation? Or a homeless person needing just $300 extra in tax returns to get off the streets? This is money that could help people out alot. Or it could be used for science programs that can’t be proven to have a real effect on the public.
You do know that people who work in the space sector get money for working and they spend in places where other people work. Oh and those weather satellites that allow us to save lives and property…. Yea space is a waste of time. We spend more money on p*rn and pizza than we do on space.
I think if you compare these numbers with polls going back all the way to the 1960s you will find similar results. Except for a couple months at the time of Apollo 11, the public has generally not been supportive especially of human spaceflight.
NASA tried to prove with Shuttle and more recently with ISS that results of experiments would prove valuable. But there are a few problems. NASA killed astronauts on Shuttle and the public did not like that. The expense of the programs has been ridiculously high, especially with ISS and more recently Orion. Shuttle was a bargain by comparison.
NASA made the integration process for payloads on ISS ridiculously convoluted and lengthy; and at the beginning of the flight program NASA ran off many of the science investigators. Some NASA management did not believe NASA should be funding science and they cut it off the funding abruptly.
Today we hear a lot about Trump eliminating grants for research; NASA did exactly the same thing 20 years ago-with no warning lots of schools, professors and grad students were left without funding.
And of course now we have Musk and Bezos funding their own space programs, and at discount rates, so NASA has met its competition and its hard to justify the huge government expenditures.
And finally NASA’s public affairs and education have gone off the rails in recent years. Once upon a time NASA provided some great educational materials; today even though distribution expenses are much lower thru use of the internet, NASA provides very little.
“And of course now we have Musk and Bezos funding their own space programs, and at discount rates, so NASA has met its competition and its hard to justify the huge government expenditures. ”
On SLS and Orion, sure, and you’ll find plenty of people who don’t disagree, including this very website’s owner I think. But Musk and Bezos make vehicles. Vehicles need things to carry. There’s a bit more to space exploration than sending empty metal into space, ya know? And what’s being proposed now is dragging Artemis along for at least another 3 years or so while cutting science.
“Today we hear a lot about Trump eliminating grants for research; NASA did exactly the same thing 20 years ago-with no warning lots of schools, professors and grad students were left without funding. ”
The US Congress voted to do these things with their budget. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Your perception of unilateral action by NASA management belies a stark misunderstanding of the budget process. Well, the “normal” budget process when an overpowered executive isn’t unilaterally impounding funds.
The US Congress voted to do these things with their budget. I’ve been in program management and I’ve been watching the ISS Program Management for years. Congress does not always control where the funding goes or how its spent. The program manager decided to cut funding to PIs and science in order to funnel the funding to his prime contractor. Yes, Congress decided to support SLS and Orion; they did not tell NASA to delay its flights for a decade or for it to cost $4 billion each flight.
We reached Idiocracy a while ago.
The real problem is that the public thinks that NASA gets about 25% of the federal budget.
I think this poll is a bit loaded because it puts space on a list alongside Medicare and Medicaid and asks the respondent to say what they’re willing to cut. There’s an implication that you have to cut something, and that the items on the list have some equality in terms of monetary value. It also specifically highlights in a different question manned spaceflight. So in the respondent’s head are thoughts of manned spaceflight to the moon and Mars, arrayed against healthcare for the elderly and disabled. Without any context of the the magnitudes involved (which the poll does not provide) I can see it being a perfectly reasonable choice.
Of course the magnitudes involved are starkly different and the choice is entirely false. In fact we’re looking likely to cut Medicaid AND space, a choice hardly anyone in the poll seemed happy with.
even better (I guess we can’t edit on this system?) the particular part of space being cut is science, not the part the respondent’s would have had in mind. Whenever NASA science comes up in the news it’s usually a big boost to NASA’s popularity and visibility in the public eye. New Horizons, OSIRIS-Rex, JWST (even with its famous budget issues).