July 8, 2009
Would More Money Improve NASA?
How much money should we spend on space?
How much should we spend on America’s space program? Does NASA’s budget need an infusion of billions of dollars? The way these questions are answered gives some indication of why one believes we have a space program, what it should be doing and whether money is the key needed to unlock the barriers hindering our access to space.
Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin recently opined that, “we’re going to have to spend what it takes.” If we can’t pursue space goals “with sufficient robustness,” he hopes that the newly formed Augustine Commission recommends that “we just not do it.” Additionally, Norm Augustine himself recently said that, despite our current technology and knowledge, ultimately, “It boils down to what we can afford.”
As we all know, spending money is easy. Spending money wisely is something else entirely. The Apollo era, when money supposedly flowed freely, is often cited as the glory days of NASA. Early Apollo spending was high primarily for two reasons.
First, in its early days, NASA had little infrastructure – few field centers, test equipment, space vehicles and the people to design, build, test and fly the spacecraft. A lot of NASA’s early funding went toward building up the facilities needed to go to the Moon: the KSC Moonport (the VAB and Launch Complex 39), the Houston MSC (now JSC) campus, the Deep Space Network and the several other installations around the country.
Second, there was a perceived political imperative that required rapid progress in space and this urgency expressed itself as high rates of expenditure. Apollo was not a journey to the Moon—it was a race and the Soviets were thought to be ahead of us. They orbited the first satellite and the first human. They did the first spacewalk and were the first to hit the Moon with a robotic probe. Being behind was a jolt and a wakeup call for Americans who believed our country was and should remain the world’s leader in technology.
With the lunar landing accomplished, the urgency of space dissipated and NASA adjusted to being just another federal agency, seeking to retain what it already had while expanding its sphere of activities to the extent that it could. However, institutionally, NASA never abandoned its business model of “racing to somewhere.” This way of thinking is manifest as NASA again pins its hopes for a viable space program on getting more money.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush (Bush 41) outlined what became known as the
Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). It called for a permanent lunar base and a manned mission to Mars. NASA’s response to the new mission directive was tepid; it produced a 90-Day Study that concluded we could do SEI if the agency budget was increased substantially. In other words, the agency response to the Presidential directive was “Give us more money.”
Flash forward 15 years. In an attempt to set a long term strategic direction for space and to assure that we maintain a productive, technological workforce, President George W. Bush (Bush 43) outlined the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). It directed NASA to return humans to the Moon and learn to use lunar resources, followed by manned Mars missions, all the while integrating private industry into the architecture.
NASA’s response to the Vision was the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), which outlined an approach using Shuttle-derived hardware. However, as work unfolded, Shuttle heritage was diluted, costs rose rapidly, the date of lunar return receded, and the idea of incrementally developing a sustainable space infrastructure using lunar resources was abandoned. The lunar surface mission was warped into a “touch and go” demonstration followed by an Apollo-style Mars mission, staged entirely from the Earth. Once again the agency’s response to a new exploration challenge was to close ranks and follow the Apollo template, repeating the refrain, “Give us more money.”
Now NASA’s former administrator, Mike Griffin tells Norm Augustine to “do it right or don’t do it at all.” In effect, Griffin is playing the “Washington Monument” game, a form of budgetary blackmail that threatens to terminate something believed to be strongly supported by Congress and the public (in this case, human spaceflight) unless some increased budgetary threshold is reached (in this case, more money to implement the ESAS.) But this “game” only works when you’re holding the high cards, in this case that the public won’t stand for the termination of human spaceflight.
In a previous blog I discussed the issue of public support for space exploration. While people don’t often think about space (and virtually no one casts their vote based on how the space program is funded), they still like the idea of having a space program. The fact that we’ve had the same space budget for thirty years (in constant dollars, between 0.5 and 1.0% of federal spending, more or less) suggests that this level of funding is politically sustainable.
As celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 begin, the agency has been unable to create a sustainable architecture for lunar return, thereby bleeding the life out exploration efforts. There is still no plan for lunar surface activities. In their urgency to exit the Moon as rapidly as possible and get to Mars, NASA is side-stepping the principal reason they were to go to the Moon in the first place – to learn the skills needed to live and work productively on another world. Is it any wonder that Congress and the public are uneasy about their space agency and its plea for more money?
The response to the questions I asked at the beginning should not be, “Give them more money.” The question we need to ask NASA is, “Given a constant level of funding over time, can you create a program that incrementally and cumulatively builds up a real space faring capability?”
If the answer to that question is “No,” then we need to ask, “Why not?”
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[...] How much money should we spend on space? How much should we spend on America’s space program? Does NASA’s budget need an infusion of billions of dollars? The way these questions are answered gives some indication of why one believes we have a space program, what it should be doing and whether money is the key needed to unlock the barriers hindering our access to space. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin recently opined that, “we’re going to have to spend what it takes.” If we ca The rest is here: Would More Money Improve NASA? [...]
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The current NASA budget request, just under 19 billion, comes out to about .54 percent of the over all budget request for 2010, about 3.5 trillion, on the low end of what the article says is sustainable. 1 percent would create a 35 billion dollar NASA, which is quite outside the realm of possibility.
Two or three billion more, which is what people like Griffin is claiming is needed, on the other hand, brings the share of NASA to a a little more than .6 percent, which is well within the range of sustainability stated in the article.
So I’m not really sure what the complaint it about.
Comment by Mark R. Whittington — July 8, 2009 @ 2:18 pm
.
I agree on give to NASA an higher and known budget over the next years and this is, exactly, one of my suggestions I want to give to the Human Space Flight Plans Committee and NASA here:
http://ow.ly/f3vQ
.
Comment by gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com — July 8, 2009 @ 2:32 pm
Two or three billion more, which is what people like Griffin is claiming is needed,….So I’m not really sure what the complaint it about.
Hi Mark,
First, I’m not complaining — NASA is. They are the ones who claim to need more money. Second, I simply do not believe that $2-3 billion more per year will make all of the ESAS problems go away; what has been crafted is essentially an Apollo-style architecture (with a sortie mission profile no less, but that is another story) that has large recurring costs and leaves no legacy hardware in place on the Moon or in cislunar space. Third, it doesn’t matter that doubling the agency budget keeps it under 1% — what’s clear is that there is no political will to raise it to that number. We’ll be lucky to keep it at current levels of ~0.5%. Fourth, my point is that such a number is still a lot of money (!) and it behooves the agency to attempt to devise something a bit more clever and innovative than Apollo on Steroids.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 8, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
I agree with some of the other comments posted here. Mr. Spudis you have portrayed NASA as being some kind of budgetary sinkhole that whines for more money to keep it afloat. The reality is that NASA’s budget has declined or flatlined for years when inflation is taken into account. NASA could not even meet the demands of its existing programs because of rising costs and inflation forcing the agency cut a number of programs. How can anyone expect NASA to establish a lunar based infrastructure when their budget is less than half of the Apollo era budget adjusted in today’s dollars. Senator Bill Nelson remarked on this budget shortfall in today’s confirmation hearings.
Comment by Gary Miles — July 8, 2009 @ 6:06 pm
Paul – I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that an infusion of cash will make the return to the Moon’s problems go away. But what such an infusion would allow the people working on those problems to better able address them and would relieve NASA of the temptation of cutting corners to save cash, a practise that in the past has come back to bite them.
If we want the return to the Moon program to expand to create a lunar settlement, more money is definately required. Mind, that can be had through commercial (my preference) or internatioal (I suspect the administration’s preference) partnerships as well as increased appropriations.
Finally, I think that what will there is to put more money in th return to the Moon project depends on what Augustine 2.0 has to say. My take from how people on the hill are talking is much depends on what it recommends.
The thing I do not want to see is the practice NASA has done before when costs have becme an issue, which is to start jetisoning capability (already started) and stretching out the schedule. Both have had pernicious results when resorted to in the past.
Comment by Mark R. Whittington — July 8, 2009 @ 6:08 pm
If we want the return to the Moon program to expand to create a lunar settlement, more money is definately required.
Mark, I simply do not agree with this. It all depends on what your mission on the Moon is and how you approach it.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 8, 2009 @ 6:37 pm
you have portrayed NASA as being some kind of budgetary sinkhole that whines for more money to keep it afloat. The reality is that NASA’s budget has declined or flatlined for years when inflation is taken into account
It has not declined — it has been static for the last 30 years. In aggregate, NASA has received the same cumulative amount of money in the last 30 years as it received to do the Apollo program (a point made by no less than Dr. Michael Griffin himself.)
You used the term “budgetary sinkhole” not me. My point is that if NASA is waiting for a significant increase in its budget before it implements the VSE, we can wait until Doomsday and end up with nothing. The current path is not affordable now nor is it sustainable in the future. Stay the course and we’ll get nothing, or at best, another 30 years in low Earth orbit.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 8, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
It has not declined — it has been static for the last 30 years. In aggregate, NASA has received the same cumulative amount of money in the last 30 years as it received to do the Apollo program (a point made by no less than Dr. Michael Griffin himself.)
Please check out this Wikipedia link on NASA’s annual budget since 1958 and check out the nominal and adjusted 2007 columns. Clearly over the last 30 years there has been several declines in NASA’s budget. The differences become glaringly obvious when comparing the nominal budgets to the 2007 adjusted. The %G of Fed Budget column is also worth noting. As a percentage of federal budget, NASA’s budget is 10 times less today than it was in 1968.
But you also miss the essential point here. While NASA’s budget has been static or declining, NASA’s operational costs have increased virtually every year due to inflation, higher facilities costs, higher material costs, and higher labor costs. Since the budget did not increase, NASA was forced to cut programs and unable to meet many of its goals. While I support the VSE and ESAS, without an adequate raise in budget, it amounted to little more than an unfunded mandate.
That comment about Dr. Griffin was taken out of context. His point at the time was that NASA spent the last 37 years stuck in LEO spending the same amount of money that NASA received for the first decade developing the Apollo program and going to the Moon.
Comment by Gary Miles — July 8, 2009 @ 8:45 pm
Gary,
But you also miss the essential point here. While NASA’s budget has been static or declining, NASA’s operational costs have increased virtually every year due to inflation, higher facilities costs, higher material costs, and higher labor costs. Since the budget did not increase, NASA was forced to cut programs and unable to meet many of its goals. While I support the VSE and ESAS, without an adequate raise in budget, it amounted to little more than an unfunded mandate.
The funding for NASA at the 0.5-1.0% level is in constant dollars. The level of inflation is already accounted for in such a reckoning. So my claim is valid: NASA has been funded at (more or less) a constant level since Apollo ended.
I know that this “unfunded mandate” charge is a common theme in the blogosphere in regard to the VSE but it is simply untrue. The VSE was specifically designed around the idea that the agency’s budget would NOT increase more than inflation. NASA was specifically told to craft an architecture doable within existing funding limits (the “sand chart”); this directive was ignored. So how is that an “unfunded mandate”?
That comment about Dr. Griffin was taken out of context. His point at the time was that NASA spent the last 37 years stuck in LEO spending the same amount of money that NASA received for the first decade developing the Apollo program and going to the Moon.
No, I did not take it out of context — that was exactly my point: what you do in space and how you do it is more important than how much you spend.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 9, 2009 @ 5:45 am
Nice essay, Paul. And I agree with you that what you do in space and how you do it is more important than how much you spend. NASA is by far the most well-funded and unified space agency in the world, and sometimes its apologists seem to forget that.
But the way you’re poo-poo’ing the idea that NASA is the victim of unfunded mandates seems frankly disingenuous. As you have so clearly pointed out, the agency’s funding has been essentially static for the past 30 years. Yet you have entirely failed to mention that NASA’s mandated missions have *vastly* expanded since the days of Apollo, largely through acts of Congress and the President. The end result is that the agency is being asked to achieve a very ambitious and diverse dossier of tasks with a budget that realistically can support only a handful of them. It would be nice if you would acknowledge this obvious fact in your critiques of the agency and its requests for more funding.
Comment by Lee Billings — July 9, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
Lee,
Thank you for the kind words.
My comment on “unfunded mandates” was specifically in relation to implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration. My point is that the VSE was supposed to be accomplished under the existing budget envelope from the beginning. In other words, NASA was tasked to construct a lunar return using the existing levels of money in the human spaceflight program. The way this was to happen was to 1) retire the Shuttle; and 2) complete ISS, followed by American withdrawal from ISS operations in ten years. The money freed up by this was to be used to build a CEV and return to the Moon.
As far as NASA’s “full plate” goes, every space mission and program that the agency is “assigned” by Congress and the White House gets specifically designated funds for their completion by the Congress. If there are shortfalls, it’s usually because the cost estimates for these missions have been low-balled.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 9, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Thanks for the reply, Paul, and your keen mention of the significant problem of low-balled estimates of mission costs.
This is a contentious topic, but it seems NASA’s stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its funding and cost estimations.
For instance, in this post you’ve endorsed the popular opinion that NASA’s response to Bush 41′s SEI plan was tepid, because the agency’s cost estimations were too high. The cynical thinking goes that NASA thus deliberately sabotaged the 1989 plan to go back to the Moon and on to Mars.
But now you’re also saying that the real cause of NASA’s budgetary woes is that the agency’s cost estimates tend to be too low.
So which is it? I know this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison; SEI was just one instance, and the damaging trend of low-balled cost estimates is very clear. But it seems that when NASA responds to ambitious mandates with more “realistic” (that is, rather expensive) cost estimates, the outcome is no better, and arguably even worse: Programs never get off the ground in the first place because of sticker-shock.
Surely we can all agree that space exploration is very expensive, and that more efforts need to be made, publicly and privately, to make getting out of Earth’s gravity well more affordable. The halcyon days of cheap, routine space exploration have not yet arrived. And so at present the case remains that, as the phrase goes, no bucks, no Buck Rogers.
I still think NASA is simply being asked, again and again, to do too much with too little. In this light, public statements by current and former agency officials that NASA needs more money are entirely appropriate and not necessarily just cynical machinations.
Comment by Lee Billings — July 9, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
Paul
My comment on “unfunded mandates” was specifically in relation to implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration. My point is that the VSE was supposed to be accomplished under the existing budget envelope from the beginning. In other words, NASA was tasked to construct a lunar return using the existing levels of money in the human spaceflight program. The way this was to happen was to 1) retire the Shuttle; and 2) complete ISS, followed by American withdrawal from ISS operations in ten years. The money freed up by this was to be used to build a CEV and return to the Moon.
NASA did submit a development program that would fit within the originally proposed budget when VSE was released. Then the Office of Management and Budget slashed some $15 billion from that budget over a five year period. Those funds were critically needed up front during the early development phase to iron out engineering problems before testing and construction began. Also, it is not realistic to not expect some hidden costs not forseen in the original budget.
Comment by Gary Miles — July 9, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
NASA did submit a development program that would fit within the originally proposed budget when VSE was released.
At that time, no architecture had been chosen so there was no basis for anything like a real program budget. What NASA did for the first two years of the VSE was to generate stacks of viewgraphs and institutional blither about “spiral development” and all that required was the existing organizational overhead. The only real mission hardware designed in that time period was LRO (which is a whole other story).
OMB has always acted as the executive brake on NASA while Congressional appropriations acts as the legislative brake. The agency was authorized to come up with an architecture to implement the VSE and they chose to come up with one that was already known to require more money than was expected.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 9, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
In 2006, Congress endorsed and approved the changes that NASA made to VSE based on the ESAS in support of the Constellation program . Thus with Congressional approval, OMB had the necessary authorization to increase NASA’s budget.
Comment by Gary Miles — July 9, 2009 @ 3:53 pm
I think we’re also forgetting that return to flight costs for the shuttle fleet after Columbia were much higher than originally anticipated. Those costs came out of other NASA accounts, including exploration.
Comment by Mark R. Whittington — July 9, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
For instance, in this post you’ve endorsed the popular opinion that NASA’s response to Bush 41’s SEI plan was tepid, because the agency’s cost estimations were too high. The cynical thinking goes that NASA thus deliberately sabotaged the 1989 plan to go back to the Moon and on to Mars.
But now you’re also saying that the real cause of NASA’s budgetary woes is that the agency’s cost estimates tend to be too low.
So which is it?
The two are not mutually exclusive; you’re mixing up two different things.
NASA sabotaged SEI because at the time, they had not launched even one piece of Space Station hardware and much of the 90-day study used Station-derived hardware. Alternative architectures proposed then (e.g., Lowell Wood’s inflatables) were dismissed out of hand (even though later, JSC developed Transhab, an inflatable hab module for deep space exploration.)
The low-balling of costs is a strategy undertaken to sell missions or programs that the agency wants. The increase in the agency’s portfolio is a chosen strategy to diversify and stay in business. This is fundamentally different from avoidance of a mission entirely.
One more point about “costs.” In the case of SEI, the money issue was only partly NASA’s fault — the commonly cited media cost number for SEI of $600 billion (for which see this) was the aggregate cost for a 30-year program, which in fact, would have been spent anyway. But NASA didn’t help matters any by devising an architecture whose purpose was mostly to “feed the beast” rather than develop new capabilities.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 10, 2009 @ 8:40 am
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