Around 83 percent of NASA’s facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance.
Having just submitted an article about a commercial spacewalk, I’m depressed that space is destined to be owned by corporations. This won’t get funded. Politicians will point to how much more efficient private companies do this. Eff.
Yet they just keep giving away the NASA budget to private for-profit companies.
Well, that’s really an attempt at saving money. And it’s a strategy that actually works with some of their contractors. (Not so much with Boeing and ULA)
The problem is that they really need more budget. There’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t have five times the funding they have now. The US military had a budget of 820 billion last year, NASA used 200 million. Meaning, that you could quintuple NASA’s budget with an additional 800 million by shifting 0.1% of military funding their way.
Personally, I think NASA is more than 0.1% as important as our military, but that’s just me.
This was by design to kickstart the private industry for space development.
NASA could have just kept building and flying space shuttles, but since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011, they were renting payload space on Russian rockets to get stuff into orbit.
Getting off of dependence on Russian rockets turned out to be tremendous foresight.