Some NASA managers may have been concerned at the timing of such a prestigous sounding report as America's Future in Space: Aligning the Civil Space Program with National Needs. And from such a worthy corner as the National Academies but Hyperbola imagines that many will be relieved at the motherhood and apple pie rhetoric that drips from its slim 126-pages that were made public on 7 July
Rather like the MIT future of human spaceflight December 2008 report, the Obama campaign space policy and the Center for American Progress Action Fund New Democracy Project, the National Academies' tome does not address the fundamental problem and instead it would seem that "national needs" is just about anything that can dreamed up by the committee that produced this tome-lite publication
The great and the good of the academies has missed the point that the big problem is that no one can get the US Congress to add federal chump change on a yearly basis to the NASA budget. The US Congress is ready and willing to pass authorisation acts that have goals as imaginative as anything the National Acadmies can dream up but without the bucks, well you, dear reader, can finish that sentence
Charles Bolden got it right when in his statement for his Congressional hearing for the NASA administrator job it said "Today we have to choose". Or more accurately Congress must choose because it is the elected representatives that have stopped a Republican president with his own Congressional majority from getting the budget increases he asked for and many of the same people on both sides of the senate/house appear to be ready to stop the US space agency from even getting the modest budget Obama requested; again at a time when the president's party controls Congress
If the big brains of the National Acadmies had earned their pay cheque with this report they might have addressed this political conundrum that the US space programme faces and proposed a way to restructure the agency to extend its budgetary appeal to the Congress men and women that count because Florida, Texas and California don't seem to amount to much anymore
Go through to the extended section of this blog post to see the "recommendations" made by the National Academies and ask yourself how much that and the rest of the 126-pages cost you the tax payer
The committee identified six strategic goals that it regards as basic for guiding program choices and resources planning for U.S. civil space activities. The goals all serve the national interest, and steady progress in achieving each of them is necessary.
• To re-establish leadership for the protection of Earth and its inhabitants through the use of
space research and technology. The key global perspective enabled by space observations is critical to monitoring climate change and testing climate models, managing Earth resources, and mitigating risks associated with natural phenomena such as severe weather and asteroids.
• To sustain U.S. leadership in science by seeking knowledge of the universe and searching for life beyond Earth. Space offers a multitude of critical opportunities, unavailable in Earth-based laboratories, to extend our knowledge of the local and distant universe and to search for life beyond Earth.
• To expand the frontiers of human activities in space. Human spaceflight continues to
challenge technology, utilize unique human capabilities, bring global prestige, and excite the public's imagination. Space provides almost limitless opportunities for extending the human experience to new frontiers.
• To provide technological, economic, and societal benefits that contribute solutions to the
nation's most pressing problems. Space activities provide economic opportunities, stimulate innovation, and support services that improve the quality of life. U.S. economic competitiveness is directly affected by our ability to perform in this sector and the many sectors enabled and supported by space activities.
• To inspire current and future generations. U.S. civil space activities, built on a legacy of
spectacular achievements, should continue to inspire the public and also serve to attract future generationsof scientists and engineers.
• To enhance U.S. global strategic leadership through leadership in civil space activities.
Because of the growing strategic importance of space, all nations that aspire to global political and economic leadership in the 21st century are increasing their space-faring capabilities. Continued U.S. global leadership is tied to continued U.S. leadership in space.
on July 9, 2009 3:38 PM | Reply
Hi,
I'm writing from the National Academies. We are delighted to see an interest in our report "America's Future in Space". We recently highlighted it on Twitter (@NAPress) as our free pdf spotlight of the day. We encourage your readers to read/downloaded this report free (http://tr.im/rogQ).
Best,
Zenneia McLendon
on July 10, 2009 2:54 PM | Reply
This post makes no sense. The National Academies report states in several places that NASA is "inadequately funded" and is being asked to do "too much with too little." Its recommendations directly address the issue of how to make the civil space program more relevant to national needs and thus garner more funding.
The report was also paid for out of the National Academies' private funds. No taxpayer dollars were involved. Did you even try to glance at the report before writing this garbage?
on July 10, 2009 3:11 PM | Reply
Its recommendations are broad brush and no attempt is made to make the hard choices that have to be made. Everyone knows NASA is asked to do too much. It doesn't take big brains to work that out. No one needs 126 pages to remind ourselves of that. To then come out with a motherhood and apple pie list of what could be done is shear laziness. Like the 2008 MIT report there is nothing imaginative about the ideas and recommendations, when US spaceflight is facing a challenge of indifference from the political class whose earmarks are funded, in the eyes of the Congress men and women, by raiding the budget of an organisation they profess to support but in fact are killing through a thousand budget cuts. I wonder where those "private funds" originally came from? The taxpayer perhaps from work on other studies?
on July 10, 2009 8:03 PM | Reply
Rob,
I can't defend the specifics of the report since I haven't read it... and some of the excerpt you quote does sound fairly platitudinous... but...
I think the whole point was (implicitly) if you don't make space more relevant to actual national needs, instead of just telling teflon/tang stories, NASA will continue to lose funding, rather than gain it.
Chairman Rockefeller had it perfectly right at the confirmation hearing: NASA needs to *earn* its funding, and right now NASA isn't doing that.
You can sit across the pond and mock our Congress if you want (God knows we do it here also), but they are expressing the popular will to a first order of magnitude by "not providing NASA extra chump change".
NASA doesn't get more money because it isn't delivering real and measurable benefit as defined by the recipients, not as defined by aerospace PR hacks (which I guess includes me). Some Senators and far too many in NASA like to wish this problem away, but it is reality, and we have to start where we are.
That said, hopefully the report is just the beginning of a dialogue about how to make NASA relevant.
on July 12, 2009 1:51 PM | Reply
What are these measurable benefits that NASA has so grossly not delivered? I have never heard anyone list them. And for my job I have had to listen to a LOT of Congressional NASA hearings. NASA maybe at fault for a lot of things but trumped up criteria is not a fair evaluation and no organisation, or person, should be treated like that. As for cost overruns, just look at the whole government aerospace procurement processes across military and civil, ranges from dysfunctional to simply broken and this experience is repeated in every developed country. Its because aerospace technology development is very hard and timetables are always going to be educated guestimates. And finally, my nationality has nothing to do with it. The majority of flightglobal.com and Hyperbola's readers are Americans. The ISS is an international venture, NASA and ESA have just agreed a joint strategy for robotic Mars exploration and assuming the Global Exploration Strategy survives the transition NASA is going through the beyond LEO goals people seem to have for the post-2020 will also be international in scope. So what Congress does to NASA when it passess authorisation acts that endorse international projects and then cuts the agency's budget is of interest to every citizen of every space faring nation.