Underfunded, Aging NASA May Be On Unsustainable Path, Report Warns (msn.com)
- Reference: 0174993487
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/14/040222/underfunded-aging-nasa-may-be-on-unsustainable-path-report-warns
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/underfunded-aging-nasa-may-be-on-unsustainable-path-report-warns/ar-AA1qkxf4
> NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The [3]Apollo era , with its huge taxpayer investment, is a distant memory. The agency now pursues complex missions on inadequate budgets. This may be an unsustainable path for NASA, one that imperils long-term success. That is the conclusion of a [4]sweeping report , titled "NASA at a Crossroads," written by a committee of aerospace experts and published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The report suggests that NASA prioritizes near-term missions and fails to think strategically. In other words, the space agency isn't sufficiently focused on the future.
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> NASA's intense focus on current missions is understandable, considering the unforgiving nature of space operations, but "one tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing that will determine the success in the future," the report's lead author, Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chief executive, said Tuesday. He said one solution for NASA's problems is more funding from Congress. But that may be hard to come by, in which case, he said, the agency needs to consider canceling or delaying costly missions to invest in more mundane but strategically important institutional needs, such as technology development and workforce training. Augustine said he is concerned that NASA could lose in-house expertise if it relies too heavily on the [5]private industry for newly emerging technologies. "It will have trouble hiring innovative, creative engineers. Innovative, creative engineers don't want to have a job that consists of overseeing other people's work," he said...
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> The report is hardly a blistering screed. The tone is parental. It praises the agency — with a budget of about $25 billion — for its triumphs while urging more prudent decision-making and long-term strategizing.
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> NASA pursues spectacular missions. It has sent swarms of robotic probes across the solar system and even into interstellar space. Astronauts have continuously been in orbit for more than two decades. The most ambitious program, [6]Artemis , aims to put astronauts back on the moon in a few short years. And long-term, NASA hopes to put astronauts on Mars. But a truism in the industry is that space is hard. The new report contends that NASA has a mismatch between its ambitions and its budget, and needs to pay attention to fundamentals such as fixing its aging infrastructure and retaining in-house talent. NASA's overall physical infrastructure is already well beyond its design life, and this fraction continues to grow," the report states.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the report "aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead," according to the article.
Nelson added that the agency "will continue to work diligently to address the committee's recommendations."
[1] https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/13/2213233/eminent-officials-say-nasa-facilities-some-of-the-worst-theyve-ever-seen
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/underfunded-aging-nasa-may-be-on-unsustainable-path-report-warns/ar-AA1qkxf4
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/amp-stories/experience-the-historic-apollo-11-mission/
[4] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27519/chapter/1
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2013/11/23/which-way-to-space/
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/nasa-moon-artemis-launch/
Duh (Score:2)
When your budget is specifically structured to prevent long term planning it's no shock when that isn't done.
NASA runs like it's a government agency that's in the middle of a tug of war between political parties that want to prevent it from working, while at the same time getting money extracted from it.
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You don't have to love or hate Elon Musk to realize what they were able to accomplish with what money they got.
Re: We privatized it (Score:2)
The Howard Hughes of our time.
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He describes himself (and his actions have generally supported it) as SLIGHTLY left. Of course, that was before Democrats/Progressive became obsessed with race/gender, children's genitalia, and decided that it would be a smart move to defund police....
Just waiting for the lefty idiots to get around to cancelling Obama because in his first term he declared that a marriage was only supposed to be between a man and a woman... Surely they cannot tolerate that ass-backwards / bigoted thinking!
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Reagan would be a woke liberal compared to the modern day republican party.
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> Musk the businessman vs Musk the MAGA 'free speech' nutcase?
You people are such fucking clowns... Musk is now a MAGA nutcase? Y'all seemed to love him when he was busy endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020.
That's what you cunts do, though. The moment one of your own (and Musk has always been a liberal) breaks out of the Hive-Mind Group-think, y'all turn on them and begin the slander.
What did he accomplish? (Score:1)
the reusable rocket tech was developed at NASA. His engineers just polished it up a bit... with the help of my taxpayer dollars.
What did I get out of Space X that I couldn't have gotten better and cheaper out of NASA? And without handing several hundred million dollars in profit and free patents to a guy who says creepy things about female pop stars and retweets neo-Nazis...
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> Remember SpaceX? Where do you think all their money came from? This is the consequence of turning space exploration into a business. It's like nobody here is ever read the space merchants by Fred Pohl....
It was costing something like $300M to put up an "average" satellite when NASA was the only game in town (unless you wanted to ship your satellite to Kazakhstan or French Guiana. What's Elon charging for the same service?
Falcon 9 - $62M
Falcon Heavy - $90M
Pretty damn good "consequences"......
Had to make sure this wasn't a dupe (Score:2)
This is the second story on NASA in the past 24 hours. At first I thought it was a rehash [1]of the first story [slashdot.org], but it's not. However, the two are tied together as lack of funding will lead to a deterioration of facilities.
[1] https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/09/13/2213233/eminent-officials-say-nasa-facilities-some-of-the-worst-theyve-ever-seen
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Underfunded, aging Slashdot may be on an unsustainable path, dupe warns!
funding (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about funding. NASA has enough money to do amazing things. We should have a Mars colony by now. But critters in Congress, mine, yours, all of them, critters in congress and presidents played political football with NASA funding allocations and used it to curry and give political favors and jobs and told NASA where it had to spend the money and changed projects and priorities like a magpie at a jewelry counter until nothing could be done.
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In 2020 dollars the Apollo program cost approx $21B a year alone compared to NASA's entire budget is $25B. We have not given a Mars mission an Apollo style effort or commitment.
[1]https://www.planetary.org/spac... [planetary.org]
Musk, to his credit there, is trying to jumpstart it in Texas and I think he knows this gives NASA a shortcut. My bet is once Starship really starts to prove itself out as a platform and they get success with HLS a Mar's mission can be funded as a joint effort.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
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> a Mars mission can be funded as a joint effort.
Musk seems happy to go to Mars with his own money.
We should let him do that, and the government can spend my tax dollars on other priorities.
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I really don't trust Musk.
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Yeah I am too quite dissapointed in his villain arc but fact is nobody else is attempting what SpaceX is trying to do down there and I do trust the other 99% of the company.
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Agreed; I wouldn't own a Tesla if you gave me one for free, but I'm (sometimes grudgingly, because it's still a Musk-owned company) impressed by SpaceX, and have been for quite some time. Musk may be the owner, but there are talented people working there, making things happen. I almost wish I could get a job there.
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I do not believe we have the technology or the resources for a Mars colony yet. We don't know enough about Mars yet. We don't have the technology or the resources to get either the materials and supplies needed to build a base or colony to Mars yet. We don't even know if humans, at our current level of space travel, can even survive the trip to Mars without dying from radiation exposure, or just plain going nuts and killing themselves on the way, because it takes months (around 7, I believe) to get there.
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Oh and while I'm thinking about it, a base on the Moon might make a great jumping-off point for a trip to Mars.
Also Mars would make a great jumping-off point for mining the asteroid belt.
In both cases there's less gravity therefore less fuel required to get on your way.
Also in both cases we might be able to use a nuclear engine of some sort and not worry about any environmental impact because it wouldn't be leaving from Earth.
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Do that and watch the economy collapse. Taxes have consequences.
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The US economy will not collapse because people making $1+ million/year are taxed at 75% instead of 38%.
Get real, or provide some facts to back your statements.
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So you’re saying the economy would be unstoppable if we did away with taxes?
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Hard to understand why I got downvoted three times to a zero.
When we did the Apollo missions the tax rate for the highest income people was 77-85%.
This didn't stop people from earning income, but it kept things in balance.
Reagan came to power and reduced it by almost half, and now we have people with access to billions of dollars, because of unregulated capitalism. This has caused millions of people every year to enter poverty and increase the wealth gap.
Simple history, go look at the numbers from pretty mu
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Might be relevant here that the Apollo program was politically motivated, we were in a 'space race' with Russia.
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Let's dismiss politics and look at the simple math, unless politics has a direct mathematical correlation to the actual funds taxed and the rates they are taxed at.
For the majority of Americans tax rates did not increase when the Apollo program was announced or started or in progress.
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How expensive was it to live back then compared to today, adjusting for the value of a dollar?
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Cost of living during 1960 was $5,600
Cost of living during 1969 was $8,390
Cost of living during 2024 was $47,779
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You got downvoted by warmongers who would prefer to spend almost a trillion dollars a year on the military rather than tens of billions on NASA.
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This is the unfortunate truth. We have had at least five unending wars since the 1970's, and non of them has be against the freeloaders. We could easily house and feed every person in North America that requires assistance, but we refuse to do so. It would lead to less homelessness, less incarceration, less domestic violence, but because of the warmongers we need to have an enemy to fight.
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Want to cut government spending? Stop giving Israel ten billion every year.
Shall We? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's take a wild guess what the problem is.
You fired all the competent people. Hounded them out. Ignored them during planning. Shouted them down.
And then several billion dollars later you found out they were right all along.
You're not giving any new people a chance. They aren't good enough. Oh sure they have advanced aerospace degrees and years of experience but that's not quite Ivy league now is it? You know best. Nobody is as smart as you are.
So they go off and invent something that gets international headlines. Just not at NASA.
You're not unique. Same thing is happening in the civilian world. Anyone who does any real work makes the rectangle heads look bad, so they get fired.
And then one day the lights go out and there's nobody left to fire.
Our parents and grandparents built the greatest nation in human history. It took fucklips one generation to destroy it.
Push to private (Score:1)
This smacks of another push to privatization.
Underfund NASA year over year ,then send money to privatized organizations? Yea, that's where the engineers will go. And then presto! Suddenly NASA isn't that attractive any longer. Who could have predicted that? Anyone remember the concept of 'starve the beast'?
Perhaps these new ventures will do well in the long term, maybe so, maybe not. But they're out of the influence of the public, even though it's our money they rely on.
All of it could have been d
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When the alternative is more crap like Starliner, you betcha!
A Political Cesspool (Score:1)
I have read a number of times that had JFK not been assassinated we probably never would have had funded the Apollo project the way we did. I understand the logic of that argument even though I am not wholly on board with that.
Regardless, it is true that the U.S. has always been reluctant to fund NASA and the reasons span the political spectrum. Conservatives hate the idea of the government being able to anything right and would rather have the money go to the wealthy class. Libertarians likewise thin
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> even though they have contributed funding.
The small piece of the NASA budget that ended up begrudging subsidizing SpaceX is the only piece that has had any actual value. You can't do big space (the "S" in NASA is space, not science,) without big rockets and NASA doesn't have any, doomed SLS not withstanding. It's a dysfunctional organization, and it's luxury in a nation racking up $75,000 of debt every second.
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I'll bet you $100 that if we got into a 'space race' with, say, China, suddenly NASA would have all the funding and access to top-notch people it could possibly want.
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Eventually all resources on this planet will be used up. It'll get harder and harder to get the resources necessary to keep everything working. Meanwhile, the planetary population of humans never goes down, it only goes up, and that means the demand on dwindling, increasingly difficult-to-obtain and increasingly expensive resources goes down. Now, there's human-caused climate change, which no one really seems to take seriously enough to do anything drastic about, which also puts a strain on those dwindling
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(whoops, screwed up: I meant "Meanwhile, the planetary population of humans never goes down, it only goes up, and that means the demand on dwindling, increasingly difficult-to-obtain and increasingly expensive resources goes up .)
Pfffff (Score:2)
All NASA has to do is put some of those big brains they have on staff and invent any / all of the following:
Plasma Weapons
Laser Weapons
Particle Beams
RailGuns
Singularity Warheads
Or any other crazy weapon from Science Fiction and mount it to any spacecraft.
From that moment onward, their funding will eclipse US Defense spending by several orders of magnitude.
( Anything in the US that goes pew-pew-pew or BOOM is automatically granted infinite levels of funding )
Anything that old is way too old to run anything. (Score:2)
Just sayin'.
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But it wasn't when you assholes elected Biden? (currently the oldest person to EVER be President)
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NASA is corrupt and moribund. NASA should be building a real rotating space habitat instead of building an earthbound bureaucracy.
This isn't about space, this is just a gravy train now. Boots in space, anything else is failure.
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> NASA is corrupt and moribund. NASA should be building a real rotating space habitat instead of building an earthbound bureaucracy.
> This isn't about space, this is just a gravy train now. Boots in space, anything else is failure.
We have congresscritters (on both sides of the aisle, by the way) that barely understand how to use a computer, and heaven forbid you expect them to understand the basic workings of the Internet, and you in all seriousness expect them to understand anything at all about a massive orbital habitat?
You must be joking.
It's nothing short of miraculous to me that the ISS is even up there.
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Thoughts on the constitution?