Note: don’t forget to check out my appearances on radio and TV today! Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.
Lots of NASA news, I know, and I’ll try to make this my last post about it for a while. But with Congress mulling over what to do with the Agency right now, even as I write this, a lot of decisions are being made that will profoundly affect space exploration by the US for the next few decades.
With all the goofiness going on, there is one bright spot: the very prestigious National Academy of Sciences just released their Executive Summary on advice to Congress about NASA. Their conclusion: loosen the purse strings. They make this very clear; their first conclusive statement in the summary is
NASA is being asked to accomplish too much with too little.
I agree; I’ve been saying that since I learned that the White House wanted NASA to go back to the Moon, but wasn’t giving NASA any more money.
It goes on like that. However, among their findings is this:
The major missions in space and Earth science are being executed at costs well in excess of the costs estimated at the time when the missions were recommended in the National Research Council’s decadal surveys for their disciplines. Consequently, the orderly planning process has served the space and Earth science communities well has been disrupted, and balance among large, medium, and small missions has been difficult to maintain.
In other words, missions costs are underestimated when first proposed. As Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, put it: missions don’t go overbudget, they are initially under-costed.
Every ten years, a survey is taken by scientists to determine what direction NASA should go for basic scientific research. This decadal survey is then submitted to Congress, which tends to lean heavily on it when deciding how to fund NASA science. So Congress says for example, yes, we like the idea of a probe to study dark energy. NASA gets money to do it. They put out a call to scientists, saying there is so much money to build such a probe. Scientists gather into teams and put together competing proposals, including the cost. NASA then chooses which one to build. This description is somewhat (okay, vastly) over-simplified, but it’s good enough to make my point.
If the team underestimates their budget, this causes problems. It might mean money is taken from another project. Take, for a recent (but not necessarily atypical) example, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It’s running way over-budget. It really was undercosted: it was proposed to cost $800 million, but its cost has doubled (as a reminder, Hubble washugely overbudget, yet nobody ever hears about that anymore. I find that very interesting; it cost a lot more than JWST ever will).
Sometimes technology doesn’t advance as quickly as predicted, sometimes things are just harder to build than anticipated. However it happened, we now have a much more expensive project in times of a very tight budget. Griffin has made it clear that JWST is a priority, but he’s also made it clear to astronomers that we can pick whether to have JWST or some other projects we want. We can’t have both.
Unless, again, Congress loosens things up somewhat. They need to increase NASA’s budget, and they need to back way off on earmarks. And, for its part, NASA needs to ride projects much better about money being spent (I’ll note that money for education and public outreach — which is where I am funded from for my day job– only totals about 1% of any given mission’s budget).
Were these things to happen, NASA will have the freedom it needs — and, hopefully, can handle — to spur American pride as it did in the late 1960s, when the whole world looked to America as a symbol of progress toward the future.
Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have happen again?
June 14th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Living as I do in the Old World, I find that many of my friends do look to America as a “symbol of progress toward the future”, we really do. The problem, IMHO, is that NASA has lost some of its glamour and appeal. Heck, I wish I had been around in the 60’s so I could have seen Apollo happen. My mother tells me about the night she stayed up almost until dawn to watch the moon landing. That is something that NASA just doesn’t have nowadays. When you get back to the Moon, I believe there will be a surge in public interest again, but until you do, NASA will be just another government agency for most people
June 14th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Interestingly, the report you cite calls for more earmarks.
That’s not quite the same thing as adding unrelated or loosely related earmarks into the budget, rather it’s more about allocating funds for specific elements of NASA’s goals. Still, it is earmarking.
The more important criticism is to reduce the extras that are plugged in that aren’t really the scope of NASA.
June 14th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Maybe NASA could do some things to earn money and support itself, and thereby reduce its dependency on the government.
For instance, maybe lots of rich people would think being flown up into space is incredibly cool and worth paying tons of money for.
Or, maybe NASA could mass-market stuff like astronaut ice cream, or sell incredibly high-quality posters, T-shirts, postcards and the like, of Hubble pictures, etc. Or your own remote-control toy Mars rover, etc. Maybe they could have a NASA amusement park+science museum, or several.
Maybe they already do some of this stuff, I don’t know. I can’t take as much interest in astronomy as I would like, due to my own constant financial struggles.
But, a big marketing push like that might help popularize NASA more. Above all, though, I think NASA earning their own money would be a lot better than having to beg Congress to give them some of the money that has been robbed from honest hard-working people through the income tax.
By the way, here’s an interesting website: http://www.freedomtofascism.com/
That site has some interesting things to say about the monetary system, income tax, taxpayer dollars, etc., so, it is in fact somewhat related to the topic of this blog post. Perhaps if the economic problems of our country were addressed at the root, then NASA’s troubles would be alleviated as well.
Great blog, I enjoy it.
June 14th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
By the way, I got a whole bunch of errors on the next screen when I just posted that. Didn’t think my post would go through, but I guess it did.
Here are the errors, copied and pasted.
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June 15th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Diana, there are legal problems with NASA marketing anything. As a government entity, it’s not supposed to be self-promoting, it’s not supposed to be marketing. Educational outreach is okay, and so is garnering publicity, but actually selling things or advertising is a No-no.
Reduce its dependency on the government? NASA is a Government Agency. It is supposed to be dependent on the government.
That doesn’t mean the way the government directs the funding shouldn’t be scrutinized.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:20 am
[…] Phil Plait reports that the National Academy of Sciences has released their advice to Congress concerning NASA. Guess what? Not nearly enough money is being allocated to accomplish what the agency is being asked to do. Since science is one of the first things to go when the budgets fall short, let’s hope Congress actually listens. […]
June 16th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Thanks for the reply, Irishman. That’s interesting to know.
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:49 am
[…] <p>Stuff going on in the blogosphere:</p> <ul> <li><a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/15/64611/5920″>Darksyde</a> writes about <a href=”http://www.bradmiller.org/”>Rep. Brad Miller</a>’s attempt to provide protection for scientific whistleblowers employed by the government. Since pressuring scientists to make their results conform to politically-desireable outcomes is standard operating procedure for the current administration, such protection is especially valuable and timely.</li> <li><a href=”http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/06/13/national-acadamies-of-science-to-congress-loosen-the-purse-strings/”>Phil Plait</a> reports that the National Academy of Sciences has released their <a href=”http://fermat.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11644″>advice to Congress concerning NASA</a>. Guess what? Not nearly enough money is being allocated to accomplish what the agency is being asked to do. Since science is one of the first things to go when the budgets fall short, let’s hope Congress actually listens.</li> <li><a href=”http://scienceblogs.com/”>ScienceBlogs</a>, you may have noticed, has expanded. Among CV favorites that have found a new home within the Borg collective are <a href=”http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/”>Dynamics of Cats</a>, <a href=”http://scienceblogs.com/loom/”>The Loom</a>, and <a href=”http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/”>Mixing Memory</a>; Bora Zivkovic of <a href=”http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/”>Science and […]Original post by Sean and Elliott Back More On: […]