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.

Armed Services: hundreds of billions of dollars more than they asked for

Postal Services: [shafted]

Space Exploration Services: [b0rked]

Heath Services: [rofl/gtfo]

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.

Yet they just keep giving away the NASA budget to private for-profit companies.

This man has never set foot in an industrial site.

the not-uncommon tendency in a constrained budget environment to prioritize initiating new missions as opposed to maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be viewed as acceptable under most industrial standards,

In the end, space will become like ships, rail and air. Initially it was funded by government, then grew out of that funding model. We’re going to see the same with space.

Space will be inevitably be dominated by corporations that are multinational. This is early days with a mix of government and private companies that are not so global.

It’s just how economics work. I think there will be a handful of companies later

Damn. That’s depressing. Around maybe 10 years ago, I did a tour through Johnson Space Center and thought it all looked a bit rundown even then.

This is part of Obama’s legacy.