Today, the Washington Post reports, “NASA officials said yesterday that the costs of returning the grounded space shuttle to flight have risen as much as $900 million over original projections, raising the possibility that the agency may have to seek extra money from Congress next year or cut other space programs to fund the shortfall… NASA’s announcement came 12 days after a key congressional committee passed a bill cutting the Bush administration’s 2005 NASA budget proposal by more than $1 billion, dealing a sharp blow to the president’s initiative to return humans to the moon and eventually send them to Mars.”
This situation raises a difficult situation for Congress. Should Congress provide more money for the Shuttle or accelerate its termination? And if Congress provides more money, where should it come from? Other NASA funding in human spaceflight (Mars?) or space science? From money going to Veterans or Housing? There are no easy answers.
In the Post article an unnamed source commented on these challenges, “One knowledgeable Republican source, who refused to be quoted by name because of office policy, acknowledged that Congress had heard about the shortfalls last month, and lawmakers “don’t know what to think about it.” While NASA is “acting responsibly” by voicing its fears early, the source said, the news “puts additional pressure on an already impossible budget — and what are you going to take it from? And is this as high as [the shortfall] is going to get?””
The escalating costs are just the latest example of the dynamics that have shaped U.S. space policy for two decades now. These dynamics have their origins in NASA’s commitment to a large, interdependent program focused on eventually going to Mars. When the whole mission to Mars was rejected decades ago NASA adopted an approach focused on “logical steps” – shuttle, station, and then Mars. But NASA’s ambitious plans lack resilience to perturbations, whether the perturbations are engineering-related or budget-related. When an unforeseen event occurs, like the loss of a shuttle or a budget overrun, its effects cascade through NASA disrupting plans and performance across the agency as it scrambles to adjust. NASA deals with the disruption and we start from scratch again. Meanwhile as NASA deals with these disruptions it makes inefficient progress towards its formal goals (e.g., lowering the costs of access to space) or even its decades-long desire to go to Mars. If this explanation is anywhere close to explaining NASA’s current situation, then simply adding more money in the absence of fundamental policy change may exacerbate rather than dampen these dynamics.
For more on these dynamics see the following two papers:
Pielke Jr., R. A., 1993: A Reappraisal of the Space Shuttle Program. Space Policy, May, 133-157.
Brunner, R., R. Byerly, Jr., and R.A. Pielke, Jr., 1992: The Future of the Space Station Program. Chapter in Space Policy Alternatives, edited by R. Byerly, Westview Press, Boulder, 199-222.