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”
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.
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.
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with private space companies.
Love:
- More and cheaper access to space is ultimately a good thing (gotta get to the Star Trek future somehow)
- What SpaceX has done with reusable boosters is game changing. I hate Musk, but I try to not think about him when I think of SpaceX
Hate:
- It’s more “socializing the cost, privatizing the profits” where much of their funding came or continues to come from government grants/contracts. It’s almost the same model as the pharmaceutical industry.
- It’s a billionaire’s game, and we’re all being exploited to fund it (beyond tax dollars at least partially funding them).
As far as NASA facilities getting their funding: Remember that SLS exists and is made entirely out of pork. So at least those facilities will continue to get funding because they’re essentially jobs programs for a handful of states.
