NASA funding fears stir multiyear debate
NASA, like the rest of the federal government, entered fiscal year 2021without a new budget.
And this leaves a giant question: How much money will it receive to fund the lunar landing system critical for lowering astronauts to the moon?
President Donald Trump in February proposed $3.4 billion for NASA toworkwith commercial companies to develop these human landing systems. But the House proposed $628.2 million in July, and the Senate has yet to weigh in.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agency has enough money to work on these landers through February.
“If we get to February 2021 without an appropriation, that’s going to really put the brakes on our ability to achieve a moon landing by as early as 2024,” Bridenstine said during a recent Senate hearing. “It’s important to get these appropriations. I will also tell you, sir, the sooner we get the appropriations, the higher the probability of success.”
Every year, NASA must ask the White House and Congress for resources to tackle its complex goals. It’s part of the political tightrope the agency walks from one year to the next, from one president to the next.
People crave stability, and politics is anything but stable.
That’s why some legislators and industry analysts think NASA, particularly its human spaceflight programs, could benefit from multiyear appropriations. Funding the agency
for multiple years, rather than annually, could help provide this much-desired stability.
“I think there is interest in the community to have that for NASA,” said Ian Christensen, a space policy expert at Secure World Foundation, which promotes the sustainable and peaceful use of space.
Multiyear appropriations are common for military programs, but he said they’re less common elsewhere. “It’s not something we commonly do in civil parts of the budget process.”
U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, is among those who would support this type of funding for NASA. He said it would enable the agency and its employees to focus on the missions.
“They just want off this yoyo,” he said. “Just do something, make decisions and stick with it.”
But not everyone in Congress agrees. Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, chairwoman of the House’s Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said multiyear appropriations would need to be carefully considered.
“In thinking about the last several years, Iwould have been uncomfortable with a multiyear appropriation for the moon program, given its unrealistic schedule, lack of a credible architecture, plan, and required organization, and other factors,” Johnson, of Dallas, said in an email.
While she doesn’t support the “rushed” approach of reaching the moon in 2024, Johnson said she would support a “credible” program to send humans to the moon and Mars.
If there isn’t an appetite for funding the entire NASA budget over multiple years, Congress could provide other types of flexibility, said Casey Dreier, senior space policy adviser for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that seeks to get more people engaged with space.
Thiswas done after the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. Congress provided NASA with money that was available for multiple years to build the shuttle’s replacement.
“Space is a unique function of government,” Dreier said. “With space projects, you just can’t do something new in one year. They’re complex to design, they’re hard to build and then they take a long time to get where they’re going.”
Yet multiyear appropriations have a drawback: lack of public oversight. The annual budget process allows elected members of Congress to have a say in NASA’s priorities and to hold the agency accountable, said Sean O’Keefe, a former NASA administrator.
And while he would have loved multiple years of funding as the head of NASA, O’Keefe said it’s impossible to know the total cost of a project that has never been done before. He said receiving money based on nearterm milestones in pursuit of longer-term objectives is a practical solution.
“It is human nature thatwe all like to see stability,” said O’Keefe, now a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Adding, “There is no substitute for a system that requires the decision-making bodies of the public sector to be accountable.”