It’s time to pink-slip NASA and its bloated budget
COMMENTARY
The Government Accountability Office, which investigates federal spending for Congress, has released its latest look at NASA procurement.
It’s a grisly document.
The “major projects” of America’s astrobureaucracy “continued to experience significant cost and schedule growth this year and the performance is expected to worsen. Since GAO last reported on the portfolio in
May 2019, cost growth was approximately
31% over project baselines — the third consecutive year that cost growth has worsened.”
The current estimate for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), “designed to help understand the origin and destiny of the universe, the creation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies, and the formation of stars and planetary systems,” is $9.7 billion. That’s up 94.7% from the observatory’s fiscal 2009 baseline, which itself was quintuple the early figure of around $1 billion. (Once expected to launch as early as 2008, the JWST won’t be sent into the heavens until 2021 — maybe.) The Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment project, to provide “essential communications and tracking services to NASA and non-NASA missions,” is running 127.4% over budget. The system’s first “operational readiness review” has been delayed “because of issues related to system stability, software defect resolution progress, and antenna pointing restrictions.”
Yet for crimes against the taxpayer, nothing can touch the Space Launch System and its Orion capsule. The former, a massive rocket intended to launch as many as 130 tons of payload, has experienced “further development cost growth of $700 million since 2019, for a total increase of approximately $1.7 billion — or 24.6% — above the program’s development baseline” of $9.7 billion. That mark, though, was set in the 2014 fiscal year. The Space Launch System dates back further — to George W. Bush’s administration, when it was the Ares V rocket. Nomenclature notwithstanding, the booster is treading what author Greg Klerkx called “familiar territory” for NASA: “Limited performance, huge price tag, and the triumph of self-interest over space-faring vision.” As for Orion, its contract was awarded in 2006, and the capsule has yet to transport a single astronaut. Amount spent:
More than $18 billion.
In an era plagued by a $25 trillion national debt, vastly higher unfunded liabilities for nationalized eldercare, and a downturn that could rival the Great Depression, the need to nix NASA is clear.
In his seminal survey of the politics of America’s “Space Age,” Walter A. McDougall diagnosed the rapid decline of the onceproud pioneer. After its successful moonshot, the historian wrote, Washington’s “technocratic machine soon broke down before imponderables ranging from the stubbornness of the North Vietnamese to the antiintellectual rebellion on the campus, the public’s boredom with space, the perturbing influence of special interests, and exploitation of the system by the mediocre, lazy or corrupt.”