I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europa orbiter. Sad to see how little progress we've made since then, and how arbitrarily the cause advances.
Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.
>with any specific direction from Congress forbidden
The only way for a present Congress to bind a future Congress like so would be by way of a Constitutional amendment. That seems like overkill.
An alternative is giving NASA independence in the model of the Federal Reserve, FDA, or NIH. This is more workable. The problem is the public doesn't value space travel per se. There are sound economic reasons for maintaining an independent central bank. Voters understand the benefits of better medicine. But space travel is less accepted in itself. It is pitched as an article of national prestige, or as a way of encouraging other technological development.
At its core, NASA suffers from an asset-liability mismatch. Its liabilities, missions, carry decade-long terms. Its asset, Congressional funding, comes in election cycles. A myopic NASA, considering only projects realisable in the current election cycle, would be disastrous. Moving to locking in, each year, NASA funding for the next N years seems like a good first step. It avoids the messiness of NASA's year-to-year budget variance. It also side-steps the politics of granting NASA independence.
A good way to fund NASA and the NSF would be to create a "technology trust fund" funded by a small tax on the sale of gadgets and software.
This would operate like the National Highway Trust Fund, which helps maintain the interstate highway system and is funded through a fuel tax.
Because the money comes from a tax dedicated to the purpose, congress doesn't get to change the funding formula every time they pass a budget. While a future congress could dissolve the fund, that's a lot bigger step than adding or deleting appropriations during the budgetary hog-trading process.
The politics would be arduous. If NASA can choose which projects it pursues it can also choose where to base operations. NASA has facilities in states and Congressional districts which make no sense beyond politics. Those who stand to lose from a de-politicisation of NASA would bring a hard fight. That is the political reality.
Yes. It would take a president and/or members of Congress who cared enough about having an effective space program instead of using NASA as a pork delivery truck, to make the change.
It would also be resisted at least as much by members of Congress who represent NASA's contractors, besides just its facilities (like Dana Rohrabacher, the congressman from Boeing). On the other hand, it would also naturally be supported by members of Congress representing at least some NASA centers and contractors who would clearly gain from the move.
A reform like this will also be boosted though by SpaceX as it keeps accomplishing more and more on a comparatively low budget, making forward-looking technologies readily available of its own volition (Grasshopper, Falcon Heavy, methane rocket engines that can use Mars in situ manufactured fuel, etc.), and creating more and more embarrassment for the traditional space program and its contractors (like the Senate Launch System (SLS)), and forcing everyone to ask, why can't NASA do that? Hopefully they will eventually shame Congress and the President into reforming NASA into a professionally-managed organization, i.e. reforming away their own control over it and making it more like a Federal Reserve for space exploration.
Not necessarily. Any constitutional amendment should be vague enough to survive for long periods. It should not even mention NASA, but make the exploration of Earth and other worlds something legislators cannot easily cut in favor of more convenient short-term gains and remove politics from technical decisions (which is what made the shuttle the sad thing it ended up being).
The amendment idea was actually a very clever hack.
NASA must remain an American company, headquartered in America, with (SOME_NUMBER)% of its workforce living and working in America. The highest authority at NASA is its version of CEO, and something like a board of directors. Their decisions outweigh political decisions. The board of directors may not be more than 20% (some arbitrary percentage) made up of people with a non-technical background.
Bureaucracy and politics are a bitch. Lately there's been the JWST overruns which have been screwing over a lot of the NASA space science budget (it's probably worth it but damn it's inconvenient).
But things are looking up and the biggest change is in launch costs. SpaceX thinks they'll be able to operate a reusable Falcon 9 for $5-7 million per launch. That seems crazy but if you look at the math it's pretty sound. That sort of change, with a first generation reusable vehicle even, will revolutionize spaceflight, especially unmanned space science missions. It'll make it possible to fund small space science missions using crowd funding. It'll open up interplanetary science missions to a huge number of colleges, universities and research organizations. A lot of the cost of space missions comes about due to the high cost of launch carrying through to every aspect of the mission (if the launch costs $200 million then you can't just launch a $1 million spacecraft, that's a waste, you also need to have a very high (say >90%) chance of mission success so you engineer accordingly).
Within the next few decades there will be fleets upon fleets of science spacecraft looking at the stars and roaming about the Solar System.
Your wish sounds very romantic. I place my bet on commercial exploration. Private companies soon will have money that can be compared to government's income, and government will be only one among many possible investors.
Yeah, it's funny how getting $100k from NASA in research grants requires proposals and peer review, but super-expensive interplanetary probes happen, or not, without any scientist input whatsoever.
Explore space while you pretend to be in the military is not that bad. Space exploration has a lot of military implications, even if the military does not pay the bills.
About everything that humans can use to reach a destination in space can also be weaponized. If nothing else, a simple space rock dropped down the planetary gravity well can make a huge boom when it hits the bottom.
Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.