Andy Pasztor (I know, I know) has a piece in today’s Journal about the NASA budget proposal that was released a few minutes ago. As Jeff Foust notes, when he writes:
Commercial-space projects are years behind schedule, and critics still worry about placing undue reliance on them.
…compared to what? At least they weren’t slopping more than a year per year, as Constellation was, and they were spending orders of magnitude less money. Jeff also says:
…the article doesn’t say what that cutback in commercial crew funding is in respect to. If it’s compared to the 2012 projection in the administration’s FY11 budget request, which called for $1.4 billion, that is almost certainly correct, especially since the NASA authorization act passed last year included only $500 million for commercial crew development in 2012. It would be more newsworthy if the administration’s commercial crew request was less than that $500-million figure, especially since the article also indicates that the budget proposal “would be broadly consistent” with the act.
Actually, my reading of it is that it’s a cut from the $500M figure:
The White House last year initially proposed NASA spending of more than $1.2 billion annually on commercial spacecraft. Congress later reduced that figure to less than $500 million a year, and the latest budget envision further trims.
That sounds like a cut from the half billion to me. But then again, it is Andy Pasztor. Anyway, we’ll know today.
[Update a few minutes later]
Clark Lindsey has more thoughts, and there’s a lot of discussion in comments.
[Update a few mintues later]
Jeff Foust has more over at The Space Review today.
Looks like the Tea Party “revolt” is going to end the New Space party at NASA and force the New Space start-ups to close their business plans the old fashion way by finding real commercial customers in real commercial markets instead of being simply government contractors in disguise (GCD).
As a side note this is why space entrepreneurs really need to start looking beyond NASA in their business plans. Its also why old space firms won’t touch NASA without getting a cost plus contract – because it’s the best protect your firm’s investments have from the space politics that swings from one direction to the next with each change in the political winds.
This is what the CC line item reads: $0.85B – commercial crew
From Nasaspaceflight.com
Still pushing those buttons, eh Thomas.
Would it be libelous to say Andy Pasztor is an ordinary liar?
Ken,
Did you honestly expect the Tea Party to support President Obama on anything? No matter how much sense it makes to do so?
Did you honestly expect the Tea Party to support President Obama on anything? No matter how much sense it makes to do so?
Sure, I imagine they’d support him on a complete rollback of Obamacare, for example. They’d probably also support him, if he chose to resign.
Nasawatch is also reporting $850 Million for Commercial Crew as the official White House line item.
If pain for commercial spaceflight support is what it takes to bring the Federal monster under control, I’m all for it. I love rocketships as much as the next enthusiast, but you need a functioning country to enjoy its benefits. Obama’s new Federal budget contains, I hear, $12,000 in spending for every man, woman and child in the country. Call it $30,000 for each adult with a job. That is wildly unsustainable. I don’t even know why people continue to buy Treasury bonds.
Could be like the dot-com bubble, where everyone realized that the prices were too high for the underlying risk but everyone thought they could find a bigger sucker to sell to before the prices crashed.
On the other hand, it’s hard for the market to predict anything when the prediction has to do with future fiats rather than underlying economics. If the government inflates away its debts rather than defaulting on any of them, TIPS could do better than gold.
I can’t come up with a rational reason why anyone’s buying non-inflation-protected federal debt. The main irrational reason seems simple enough, though: there’s never been a debt default or hyperinflation in the U.S., so by induction there never will be.
I’m half considering deleting this whole comment as off-topic rather than hitting the submit button, but it is hard to discuss commercial spaceflight (or military aerospace, or contracted and/or subsidized research of any sort…) without discussing what’s going to happen when we’re finally stuck figuring out how to get by with only the expenses we can pay for.
I would blame the Tea Party for cuts in their budget proposal and blame Obama for the cuts in his budget proposal.
One could also flip Thomas Matula’s question. Do you expect Obama to support or cooperate with the Tea Party?
Obama is content to let the Tea Party make the hard choices about cutting spending and having surrogates demonizing them in the media. It is a win win for Obama.
I think that the problem isn’t support or opposition, I think it’s just that few think of space at all, and they want to cut all funding.
BTW, wasn’t spaceX’s total investment for their 2 current systems, and a third (if they get the COTS to full) less than 600 million? Isn’t that 3/5ths of the price of a single shuttle launch? What are peoples problems?
Obama is content to let the Tea Party make the hard choices about cutting spending and having surrogates demonizing them in the media. It is a win win for Obama.
Which is what people who recognize leaders call, “A lack of leadership.”
Unfortunately, NASA’s budget issues are embedded in the budget issues of the entire government. I would love to take $x billion presently being thrown down various social uplift, crony capitalist, union featherbedding, or porkulent ratholes and redirect it to something genuinely useful. Like commercial spaceflight!
But I suspect the only way to get some of the sacred cows slaughtered the need to die is going to be for everyone who wants this to happen to let his own cow be part of the bloodbath. Roll everybody’s budget back to 2008 and be done with it.
G’day,
The NASA budget is still over $18B . Considering the severity of the economic problems facing the United States thats far too generous. Rand Paul wants to cut it down to $12B. Thats a good start
ta
Ralph
Space tax dollars and private investment space dollars are I think at least a little fungible.
With government out of the space business I suspect private interests would step forward and take a much greater and more constructive interest in commercial space. It would not surprise me if cutting NASA funding actually resulted in more, effective dollars, being invested in commercial space.
So what is the budget for NASA’s GISS and JPL climate research efforts? Lose those and you lose nothing.
The biggest losers in whatever comes out as a NASA budget at the end of the process may be space science and unmanned exploration. Meanwhile, whatever else happens the dumb SLS and Orion-whatever will continue to get pork money.
Now, I hope that someday we will have big, new private markets requiring robust, low cost space systems and launch vehicles. As Pete Worden suggested a few years ago, at that point we might be able to have space telescopes and probes entirely funded from the private sector, like the great Earth-based telescopes of the past (and sometimes still in the present).
But in the meantime, do you really want to cease planetary exploration, lose the Webb telescope and prospective planet hunting scopes that could both find Earth-size worlds and take their spectra?
Go ahead and accuse me of wanting everyone _else_ to take the medicine to start to fix the budget. I don’t care, it won’t change the nonsense of trying to do it on the back of discretionary spending – which can really be only symbolic – and by demolishing such a tiny and worthwhile part of it at that.
Otherwise…I’ll be dead before we see such wonders as we have gathered by automated systems again. There is no stronger advocate of crewed spaceflight than I am, but the unmanned stuff gives us a great return even with the vastly over-costly space systems and launch vehicles of today.
Selfish? Sure. But this “Child of Apollo” doesn’t want to lose what we’ve had in lieu of manned exploration as well.
There is really only one US federal expenditure that needs to be cut. It is a cut that would be wildly popular across the political spectrum. Elimination of the department entirely might not be possible, but a 95% cut in just that one department could be done, and by itself that one cut could balance the budget.
De-fund the IRS. How? Fair Tax.
[[[With government out of the space business I suspect private interests would step forward and take a much greater and more constructive interest in commercial space.]]]
Yes, with the government gone they will have to look for real commercial markets instead labeling the government market as “commercial”. Only good things would came from that in terms of opening space to settlement and development.