Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne,
the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered,
“We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”
Austerity notwithstanding, that's really a sad sign of the times (and state of science funding in the US).
There's no austerity. I don't even know where you'd get the idea there's some sort of austerity in the US.
NASA's problems lie elsewhere, mostly in the form of having a boss (Congress) who demands that they spend their money in mind-bogglingly inefficient ways, and then adds further inefficiencies by continuously jerking them around. Giving them more money won't solve this problem.
You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights for travel, cheapest everything. They balked at a $12 meal once when It was within an hour or so of a flight home once. We had trouble buying $300 hard drives at times (to run $100k software on). My engineer's salary was modest at best.
But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity of their whims.
Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night, resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite). That's $100 million, wasted on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?
Even sadder, Triana costed only 1/3 of what is spent on the war in Afganistan each day. I would prefer to see people in NASA enjoying wide arrays of 15K drives, competitive salaries, and business class seats...
By no means did I mean to imply anyone was living high on the hog or that NASA is rolling in money. I just don't think the solution to that problem is more money.
My personal hope is that partnership with private space companies will allow NASA to be more NASA than they can be today. If they are able to refocus into a stronger research role and not be singly responsible for a complete space infrastructure I think it should free up a bunch of funds, and while nothing can change the fact that it is by its very nature a creature of Congress, a lot of the more obvious pork opportunities will be eliminated. And should NASA be forced to abandon a project, having at least the choice of having it picked up by industry is a good thing.
This is far more likely to solve the core problems than more money, and once the problems are solved, if the whole system starts clicking along better and making better progress, then I'd be relatively happy as a tax payer to give them more money.
I think your characterization is wrong. It seems that you Bush canned the project. According to the asked the National Academy of Sciences whether the mission was "strong and scientifically vital." What information do you have that they didn't?
I was there. It was a political sales job from day one, with people searching high and low for scientific justification for Gore's folly. I don't mean to disproportionately abuse Gore - he was just the main character in this plot and did a lot to make it easy political pickings. Republicans were obviously very keen on killing it once they caught wind of it.
I do recall they eventually found some instruments to put on the thing, but it was bass-ackwards. You don't launch a satellite into a very specific orbit that allows for a pretty picture, and then go looking for science to justify it. You come up with the science, and try to sell your way into the proper orbit.
The bottom line is that a presidential hopeful said "I want this stupid thing", and NASA said, "How high, sir?" Then, after much handwaving and scrounging of scientific merit, the victorious politicians (Bush, et al) said, "never mind - scrap it."
Also, NASA isn't mind-bogglingly inefficient. Citation needed, I guess. Besides, their budget is a puny 0.5% of the federal budget, compared to 1% back in 1990. The return on science spending is, as far as I know, typically pretty good in the US.
Your own links show NASA at a fairly flat budget level, not in austerity with cuts.
I neither trust nor agree with Krugman's definition of austerity, nor do I see how to square his definition with budgets like [1] that show growth almost across the board.
As for NASA's inefficiency, an efficient department would not be able to purchase private space services from SpaceX for a fraction of what they can do themselves. (As for the argument that SpaceX can and did just build on NASA's work... so can NASA. They ought to be able to do even better than a third party building on their stuff, no?)
1. NASA's budget has been cut every year since 1998, as a fraction of the federal budget, although their budget in dollars has increased[1].
2. Krugman doesn't count some expenditures, such as social security, unemployment benefits and a number of other items. He argues on his blog why this paints a more accurate picture. (Search for "Austerity")
3. SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too. It's better to compare NASA's inefficiency with other big research labs.
NASA's budget has been cut every year since 1998, as a fraction of the federal budget
The fact that the federal government's budget grows like a cancer does not mean that NASA's budget is austere, nor does it mean that NASA should get more.
It's simply absurd to claim that your budget has been "cut" when it has actually been increased, even in real terms. Your argument sounds like the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Racketeer Rabbit", where they're counting the loot: "One for you; one for me. Two for you; one, two for me". Somebody else getting money does not mean that you're entitled to additional money.
SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too.
The online conclusion I can see to draw from this is that NASA should be wholly disbanded. We'll create a new one, since even a typical startup should be able to outpace the old-time behemoths.
On the first part, I agree, NASA's budget is basically constant in real terms over the past 2 decades or so. The bigger problem imo is not the total amount of money, but all the strings it's come attached with, and in particular constantly-changing strings. If NASA got $17 billion and the freedom to decide how it should be best used to advance scientific goals, that would be one thing, but instead every President and Congress has their own pet ideas about what NASA should do with the money, and so it ends up getting allocated to a rotating parade of prestige projects that end up going nowhere.
On the latter point, I don't see NASA as really less efficient when they're given freedom over designs. They have some pretty impressive low-cost-satellite programs that teams of scientists have put together out of small bits of discretionary funds. And while StartX is impressive for a private company, I think it'll be some time before they're doing NASA-level work. For example, none of the private sector companies seem to be even attempting scientifically useful things like space telescopes, Mars rovers, or interplanetary probes, even though there is no technological barrier to doing those (they're doable with literally decades-old technology).
On #2, this is also including all levels of government, while the comment you're replying to links a Wikipedia article on the federal budget. The U.S. federal government budget has not been declining, but state and local budgets have been declining sharply, so you get pretty different results depending on what levels you look at.
Total government spending in the US doubled from 1998 to 2011.
While the US economy only increased by 1/3, and population only increased by roughly 15%.
Why would you need twice the government spending for 15% more people? We had 270 million people in 1998, and now have 312x million.
Total government expenditures (local + state + federal) in the US came to over $7 trillion in 2011 (counting the deficit spending). Out of an economy that is close to $16 trillion. Under absolutely no scenario is that austerity, it's the greatest spending binge in world history.
To put it another way, our government system spends more than the combined economies of Germany + France + Britain are worth.
If that's austerity, then the 1990s were hyper austerity by comparison. Somehow we managed to have a government that was more functional then than the one we have now.
Well, that's how Krugman would like to justify it. But, on the other hand, when it comes to politics, Krugman is a complete ass. (and I think I can say that in a completely objective manner)
There is no reasonable definition of austerity that can be satisfied in these conditions. The US (and various European govt's that Krugman has been blathering about) were already spending a lot of money. For the most part (a few very limited examples exist), their spending has kept pace with, and generally even exceeded, inflation.
When the government is taking at least as much of the country's pie as it always had, and generally even a growing share, it is simply absurd to call that austerity.
Since many have commented on the term "austerity" (and that I implied that NASA is undergoing austerity measures), I should clarify that I only meant "the general political sentiment that austerity is a GOOD thing notwithstanding, it still sucks that NASA can't (culturally) buy a bottle of champagne when they complete a $1.5bn project".
Apologies for popping the austerity genie out of the bottle.
Also, during the W administration much of the money for real science was redirected towards a manned mission to Mars. This caused terrible financial woes for the department I worked at at MIT for many years that does X-ray astronomy (The Center for Space Research). Quite a few people were laid off, including me, due to the CSR not being able to get the science funding from NASA it always had been able to get previously.
It's a classic anti-science move of forcing them to commit to an impossible project and then later lay into them for not making any progress and cut funding even more severely.
I saw the inflation calculation in the Wiki tables. You could even argue that inflation calculation is low, and that inflation has been far worse given the price of gold / oil / housing over the last 30 years.
My point was: NASA is doing just fine. They're fortunate to still be getting that much money year in year out. It's a lot of money.
You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading.
7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.
So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?
15.1 -> 18.4 is still a 22% increase. That's arguably "no effective increase" if you're counting per capita, but if NASA is the type of public good that offers the same amount of value whether population increases or not, I don't think a 22% is too bad. It just looks sad next to the other categories that have increased so much more.
It's an increase of 0.8% per year. And if the time series happened to have been started at 1988 -- there was a big increase in NASA's budget between 1987 and 1988 -- it would have been about 0.16% per year instead.
(Incidentally, something is definitely wrong with Wikipedia's figures, which show the nominal budget going up $7.6M -> $9.1M but the inflation-adjusted budget going down $17.7M -> $14.5M between 1987 and 1988.)
The goods provided by NASA are things like technological innovation, scientific discovery, and sheer coolness, all of which (it seems to me) provide net benefit proportional to the population. And the tax revenues available to fund it are kinda-sorta proportional to population too, even ignoring economic growth. So an increase of, at most, 22% over a 25-year period during which the population has grown by about 28% and the inflation-adjusted GDP by about 2x ... yes, I think that is too bad.
