Around 83 percent of NASA’s facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance.
Having just submitted an article about a commercial spacewalk, I’m depressed that space is destined to be owned by corporations. This won’t get funded. Politicians will point to how much more efficient private companies do this. Eff.
Armed Services: hundreds of billions of dollars more than they asked for
Postal Services: [shafted]
Space Exploration Services: [b0rked]
Heath Services: [rofl/gtfo]
My favorite description of America is “Three weapons manufacturers in a trench coat pretending to be a government”
Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon Technologies. Just pure, unmitigated evil.
Don’t forget Boeing and General Dynamics
I’m a scientist who is contracted through NASA and work at one of the NASA facilities. As an early career scientist, working here is a dream job. I get the opportunity to work with absolute world class scientists everyday. That said, the funding situation is dire at all NASA facilities due to funding cuts. The current saying is “flat is the new up” in terms of funding. That means if NASA maintains its funding, it’s a win. As a result, NASA would rather maintain science and engineering with the limited budget, but at the expense of the facilities themselves. I can attest that it is a stark difference between someplace like the Applied Physics Lab at Hopkins (lots of military contracts) vs Goddard Space Flight Center in terms of the quality of the facilities.
The problem is Congress looks for funding cuts in discretionary funding. Mandatory funding consists of social security, healthcare, and veteran programs. Discretionary funding is everything else, which makes up only roughly 25% of the rest of the budget. Military takes half of the discretionary budget. Democrats nor Republicans dare to touch the military budget despite the fact they fail their audit every single year. This leaves 900 billion for everything else. NASA gets about 4% of that.
Since the tax code is totally fucked up in this country, the richest people pay the least percentage through loopholes and corporations barely pay anything (9% of the total revenue), it’s up to the working class to make up the difference. Since understandably no one wants their taxes raised, in order to reduce spending they look to the “everything else” part of the discretionary budget. And NASA is part of this and is considered expendable. It’s sad to see such an important institution for the U.S. slowly dying. I want to believe the outlook is promising, but I just can’t see the future looking any brighter.
Have you guys considered not being broke bums? /s
I read the title as “Eminem officials…” and tough it was about Eminem testing some recording facilities for NASA or something.
It is not democracy. This is the gutting of the US in favor of a neo feudal dystopia.
Yet they just keep giving away the NASA budget to private for-profit companies.
Well, that’s really an attempt at saving money. And it’s a strategy that actually works with some of their contractors. (Not so much with Boeing and ULA)
The problem is that they really need more budget. There’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t have five times the funding they have now. The US military had a budget of 820 billion last year, NASA used 200 million. Meaning, that you could quintuple NASA’s budget with an additional 800 million by shifting 0.1% of military funding their way.
Personally, I think NASA is more than 0.1% as important as our military, but that’s just me.
Just to put that in perspective: that’s less than a dollar per American for NASA and over a thousand dollars for the military.
This man has never set foot in an industrial site.
the not-uncommon tendency in a constrained budget environment to prioritize initiating new missions as opposed to maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be viewed as acceptable under most industrial standards,
Space will be inevitably be dominated by corporations that are multinational. This is early days with a mix of government and private companies that are not so global.
It’s just how economics work. I think there will be a handful of companies later
Heh, as our reach into space increases, we may end up with “multiglobal” organizations. (Interglobal?)
it will be a Weyland-Yutani corp
In the end, space will become like ships, rail and air. Initially it was funded by government, then grew out of that funding model. We’re going to see the same with space.
Damn. That’s depressing. Around maybe 10 years ago, I did a tour through Johnson Space Center and thought it all looked a bit rundown even then.
This is part of Obama’s legacy.
This comment is one of your parent’s legacy.
