NASA's Competition For Dollars 78
An anonymous reader writes: We often decry the state of funding to NASA. Its limited scope has kept us from returning to the moon for over four decades, maintained only a minimal presence in low-Earth orbit, and failed to develop a capable asteroid defense system. But why is funding such a problem? Jason Callahan, who has worked on several of NASA's annual budgets, says it's not just NASA's small percentage of the federal budget that keeps those projects on the back burner, but also competition for funding between different parts of NASA as well. "[NASA's activities include] space science, including aeronautics research (the first A in NASA), technology development, education, center and agency management, construction, maintenance, and the entire human spaceflight program. The total space science budget has rarely exceeded $5 billion, and has averaged just over half that amount. Remember that space science is more than just planetary: astrophysics, heliophysics, and Earth science are all funded in this number. Despite this, space science accounts for an average of 17 percent of NASA's total budget, though it has significant fluctuations. In the 1980s, space science was a mere 11½ percent of NASA's budget, but in the 2000s, it made up 27 percent."
Re: How Does SpaceX Do it? (Score:3, Interesting)
No reason to send ppl to space? Wouldn't you like to leave this polluted rock behind? Last time I checked progress happen in iterations - not leap frogs. For that we should keep practicing, so not just few extremely apt ppl can do it - but everyone.
Priorities Changed - And People Got Suspicious (Score:2, Interesting)
This is entirely due to a matter of federal government policy. When President Kennedy made his famous speech to declare his intent to put a man on the moon, he made a massive change to state funding. His intent was to kick-start the U.S. economy by pouring a huge amount of tax dollars back into the US economy by giving it to NASA as the primary recipient at the "top" of a spending pyramid. The idea was that NASA would then award contracts to lots of other companies, who in turn would generate more work with tertiary companies, thus pouring all that tax money back into circulation as seed funding. Part of the reasoning was that the scientific developments driven would then flow out into the broader economy, powering the US forwards. It was pretty successful in that regard. And, of course, those who owned or held shares in those primary contractors did very well out of things. Thanks NASA...
More recently, public perception has changed. The broader population has come to view (perceived) profligate spending with much more suspicion. Yet still the federal government wants to spend trillions of inflation-adjusted tax dollars. Now, a more sophisticated, educated population might look at ever-increasing NASA spending, and those trillions being spent, and call time. So what can the government spend all this money on in a way that people won't cry foul?
The answer that seems to have been chosen is defense spending. Make people frightened and then tell them you need to spend money in order to make them safe, and they aren't going to complain too loudly. So now, instead of spending "surplus" wealth on the advancement of humanity through exploration and research, it's being spent on the NSA, the military-industrial complex, and wars. To keep people safe.
This might sound completely and totally far-fetched... but the evidence is there in black and white. And while you're looking at the evidence, compare the cost of projects like Skylab and the Apollo program [in inflation-adjusted dollars] with what it cost Burt Rutan to develop Space-Ship One, or for Bigelow Aerospace to develop their inflatable station technology, or for Elon Musk to develop Space-X. Oh - someone is bound to read this and challenge the comparison, claiming that these relatively recent companies are only able to develop such rapid advancements based on the earlier work done by NASA in the 1960s and 1970s. But that's not quite true... Take, for example, the development of the Arianne program by the European Space Agency and see just how expensive the "government spending" model can still be if you want it to be...
This would entirely be the land of make believe, but just imagine what NASA could have achieved by today if it had continued to receive sponsorship and support at the same level as it did for the Apollo program... I'm guessing: permanent basis on the moon and Mars; several advanced Outer Planet models; experiments in Space Mining; orbiting Solar Arrays; the list goes on.