Bureaucratic Creep: NASA Style
NASA's Predicament - New York Times
Interesting little read here from the NY Times Editorial section. Especially in light of the fact that the first hurdles for private, commercial space flight have already been cleared.
NASA's PredicamentNASA is headed into the next year with ambitious goals and no assurance that it will get the money needed to carry them out. With large deficits looming in the space shuttle accounts, there is some danger that the space agency could work itself into a familiar corner by trying to do too much with too little, a sure-fire recipe for disaster.
Under existing plans, the creaky shuttles are supposed to keep flying until 2010, with all flights except one devoted to completing the construction of the international space station, which is limping along, half-finished, some 240 miles overhead. Then NASA will rush to complete a successor to the shuttle - called the crew exploration vehicle - by 2012 and use it to send astronauts to the Moon by 2018.
The rub is that NASA needs some $3 billion more than previously projected to fly an additional 18 shuttle flights to complete the station and a 19th to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Unless the White House or Congress sees fit to pony up the needed money in coming fiscal years, NASA will have to make deep cuts in some programs.
The agency got a big lift from Congress this month when large bipartisan majorities passed an authorization bill that instructed NASA to engage in a broad range of activities and suggested that NASA be given increased funds, reaching a total of $17.9 billion in fiscal year 2007 and $18.7 billion in fiscal year 2008. For the first time, Congress clearly and explicitly endorsed the Vision for Space Exploration, which was announced by President Bush in January 2004, and directed NASA to plan for a permanent base on the Moon as a steppingstone toward a human mission to Mars. Yet it also tried to ensure that NASA would pursue a broad range of studies beyond the president's exploration plan.
The bill requires that at least 15 percent of the money spent for research on the space station go to studies not related to the exploration programs. That seems consistent with a recent National Academy of Sciences report that complained that NASA was jettisoning fundamental research in the biological and physical sciences and focusing too narrowly on studies that could further the president's exploration goals.
But authorization bills do not actually provide money. The real test will come when President Bush submits his budget proposal for fiscal year 2007 in February, and Congressional appropriations committees decide how much money they are willing to put up. If it is significantly less than NASA needs for its assigned tasks, the agency and Congress will need to curtail some of them, lest NASA fall into the old trap of cutting corners and jeopardizing safety. From our perspective, the costly shuttle and the space-station complex look more expendable than pathfinding robotic probes of the solar system and a transition to new manned space vehicles.
In loving memory to Bill Proxmire, however, the case for privatizing NASA is becoming more and more self-evident with each passing leap of technology. It's clear that government should be out of this business when the material writes itself as easily as "[Congress] also tried to ensure that NASA would pursue a broad range of studies beyond the president's exploration plan." Just imagine if Congress tried running the airline industry as effectively as they do NASA.
There are still a few of those leaps of technology yet to go before a full, fledgling private industry can be built around space exploration. If anyone is serious about the benefits of what the private sector can do better than the public sector, then they're missing one heck of an opportunity to further their case. For a fraction of the pork that Congress spent on unneccessary space studies, they could be sowing the seeds of a growing private sector industry.