NASA's 2015 budget plea: Jobs, pork, small business – OK, science NASA would receive $17.46bn as its share of the Obama administration proposed budget for fiscal 2015, released on Tuesday, down from the $17.65bn it's receiving this year, but healthily up from the $16.87bn it managed to scratch out in sequester-squeezed 2013. That is, if NASA can convince members of Congress that it would be …
"and then give that $26 billion to NASA ...."
US taxpayers might want to see NASA's appalling management overhead brought under control first. Central and cross agency management & support functions accounted for 16% of the budget in 2013. I work for a very large European corporate not renowned for its efficiency, of similar scale to NASA in both employees, revenue and capex budgets, and our corporate support costs are around 4% in total. NASA don't even have the support complications of multiple languages and multiple jurisdictions that we have.
NASA's center management & support costs alone (ie excluding the "cross agency" stuff) were greater than the total spend on both planetary science and astrophysics. Even "commercial space flight" is a cost item at NASA - they might want to leave that work to Ariane and SpaceX, rather than burdening the US taxpayer?
I'm not a Merkin, so it's none of my business, but it looks to me that NASA is very poorly managed, and uses the smokescreen of cutting edge science and high technology to hide its incompetent management.
I get the feeling you may be deliberately misunderstand the situation. Yes the budget for CMO and AMO is a fair portion of the total budget but the scope of their responsibility is significant. You are talking about maintaining, commissioning and decommissioning all their facilities as programs come and go, dealing with all the training and safety costs, the IT spending, the list is pretty long. They have to deal with keeping facilities just because the state its just because a senator pulled some strings or with , in the space of a couple of years demolishing or decommissioning 70+ buildings at one site alone because constellation was canceled, or with downsizing the rocket propulsion testing facility at White sands after the shuttle got canned. They built a groundwater treatment plant due to some contamination, the budget also covers buying supercomputers ($150 m a year on IT iirc).
Seriously, those two departments are a catchall that deal with pretty much anything and everything that isn't directly related to a currently in progress project. If anything it seems like they deliberately shift costs out of projects and into this budget to make their missions look cheaper.
I don't advocate writing a blank check but a normal company doesn't work the same way, NASA isn't a company. It has to operate in a world where maintaining any kind of mission stability is akin to wallpapering fog. How efficient is any company going to be when you give it a task as large as constellation then can it 6 ish years later.
Companies like space x etc can do what they do cheaply and efficiently because they don't have to deal with anywhere near as many unknowns. NASA put men on the moon over 40 years ago from a start point of not having a clue what most of the problems would be, these companies are rethinking an existing solution to make it more efficient.
NASA is cheap, the f35 program would find NASA for somewhere around 50 years. We throw money at the military like crazy, we found $800 + bn for the war in Iraq yet we can't find the money for peaceful space exploration?
Half the college sports budgets would free up nearly $4bn, even just removing the subsidy would provide over $2.3bn a year (I know that's not a direct government expenditure). That should allow for some more projects.
I agree with using more cost effective private solutions for near earth 'routine' stuff as long as they are safe and that doing it in house wouldn't allow for synergies. NASA should be doing (and be funded to do) more ambitious projects. Yes they are inefficient compared to a private company but they also manage to do things private companies cannot. The shuttle would have been cheaper if it hadn't of had military requirements and how many of these (admittedly very talented) young space companies are standing on NASA's shoulders. We need NASA, we also need it to be doing bat sh!t crazy stuff like a moon base or landing on an asteroid. Not even because of what we might discover there or the technologies we might invent along the way but because we need to inspire the next generation. We want kids to aspire to be scientists who design supersonic passenger jets and Moon bases not just football players or Paris Hilton clones, that can be their fallback. What chance do we have when is not a priority for us?
"We want kids to aspire to be scientists"
How can we inspire kids to become scientist when the scientific world is full of sexism, back stabbing and an unhealthy amount of jealousy. It's an unpleasant place to be. The corporate world, with all its flaws is ahead of the scientific world in that regard.
Yes because what the world needs is more MBA's :) We might run out of lawyers then what we use for ballast under railway tracks.
I did a stint at DuPont in research and I honestly did not find what you mention although that was commercial research, designing and evaluating catalysts, rather than pure academia. The biggest ism I ever encountered was ageism. I always found the world outside far worse for isms. The corporate world isn't much better. Don't women hold less than 5% of CEO positions for fortune 500 companies? I doubt it is much better at board level.
If they funded Commercial Crew to the level the President requests.
BTW if the SLS flies the problem then becomes how does NASA afford the payloads.
In truth the whole US system of funding needs overhaul but that's not going to happen anytime soon, and the assorted SEL' s in the Legislature will ensure that fails to happen until there is significant "regime change."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
