You can blame Congress. Congress insists on zip-code engineered space hardware whose primary mission is to ensure profit for contractors in their districts. The Administration, no matter who heads it, generally doesn't buy that approach, which is why you see the old programs scrapped (because they weren't going anywhere).

(Putting the Earth-science thing aside for the moment.) It really is a mostly non-partisan divide, here.

NASA has its own problems. A culture of risk averseness that is incompatible with new approaches like reusable rockets (although NASA will use them if they're proven by others). A culture of safety-uber-alles which is even more incompatible with expanding the capability of human space exploration in particular.

But for all that, NASA still accomplishes great things. NASA has been critical for the success of SpaceX (around 2008 in particular) and even has helped Blue Origin considerably. NASA has completed the International Space Station (the largest spacecraft ever built by far) and kept it inhabited since 2000. No one under the age of 20 remembers a time when there wasn't at least a couple people aboard the Space Station. This program has built up a level of experience with long-term human spaceflight that, in aggregate, exceeds all other such programs. We have experience manufacturing in space and leveraging ISS for launching commercial satellites (Planet.com in particular), helping pave the way for the current wave of smallsat launchers.

There are now half a dozen active satellites (half from NASA, but all with assistance from NASA) in orbit around Mars, two active on its surface, plus a probe around dwarf planet Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, and another probe, New Horizons, which has visited Pluto for the first time and is now on its way to other destinations deeper in the solar system. This is all just scratching the surface of NASA's accomplishments in this time. (And next year are slated the launch of two commercial crew vehicles that NASA has been funding, SpaceX's Dragon 2 and Boeing's Starliner.)

Also next year; James Webb Space Telescope.

It's also Congress' fault because they insist on extremely expensive programs such as SLS and Orion.

See https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/04/obama-resuscitates-o... and https://arstechnica.com/science/2009/10/nasa-panel-argues-fo...

Quote: "The committee has concluded that NASA now has plans that don't reflect any sort of budgetary reality". This is back in 2010.

More recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Criticism

Yeah. You can see it two ways: The SLS is an embarrassment or an admission by Congress that they don't care at all about spaceflight.

It's absolutely the latter. Congress has never really cared about spaceflight - to your Congressman it's just an opportunity to bring federal dollars to his district, because that will get him reelected.

But why not make real plans and actually get something accomplished, then you can point to something truly concrete during re-election, and even bump the funding even more.

The money you get from contractors for reelection is going to help more than anything you can actually point to. House seats are up every two years, and you don't accomplish much in aerospace in two years.

And if you want to push money to your districts make sure it's useful.

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

I'm pretty sure the big reason Apollo was successful was that they had enough support to get the job done within that 8-year period. And, no surprise, Nixon's election heralded the end, although inertia kept it moving for a few years.

The Soviet Union pretty much quitting a year or so after the US landed on the moon is what did it.

But the same people were in Congress, pretty much.

The problem is the public lost interest in the moon. It's a big dusty rock with nothing much to recommend the billions we were spending to go there.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Seriously! "The U.S. military budget is higher than the nine other biggest military budgets in the world combined." It's insane.

Btw for 2017 it's 773.5 billion USD.

To get an idea of whan a mind-bogling number that is: Its about the amount of the GDP of the Netherlands. The whole economic output of a 1. World country with 17M inhabitants is slightly smaller than this budget.

[0]: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf

The funny thing is, with the kind of space presence that kind of money buys you (we're talking Clarke-style rotating space stations here), nobody would dare fuck with you.

You don't need an official space weapons program to be able to drop heavy things from orbit. Nor do you need a fancy anti-satellite ballistics system when you can have one of your many astronauts sidle over and hit it with a hammer.

Droping stuff from orbit is cool scifi weapon system, but in practice it is surprisingly hard to do (you cannot just drop stuff, you have to impart it with some deltav to cancel out orbital velocity of the station) and inefficient (you have to get the stuff up there, which when you ignore atmosferic drag requires same amount energy as the projectile would release on impact)

This. Land-based missiles are far cheaper and more effective.

Recently I've seen this quote:

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC

And exactly this thing seems to be the major problem with essentially every space-related weapons platform other than ICBMs. Simply almost every such proposed system uses some expendable ammunition that is significantly more expensive to deploy or even just manufacture than what it is supposed to destroy.

part of logistics is the ability to do something. It doesn't have to be practical for me to drop a heavy thing on you, I just need the ability to do it if you push me hard enough. If I'm governor of a space station I'm better off not turning half my space station into a bomb on your capital, but if you push my hard enough I might feel compelled to do that so you will treat me and my needs with respect.

Problem with this is that it has to be credible threat. Even when you would fill ISS with conventional explosives and somehow arrange for it to land on reasonably precise spot and explode on impact the damage caused will be many orders of magnitude smaller than what you would expedite to do all that (and this holds even when you take the expense as a fraction of relevant defense budgets instead of absolute values)

I wonder if someone could sell Trump on this? After his rumblings about altering Geneva and NATO treaties, I'll bet someone could convince him to ignore the Outer Space Treaty and throw NASA a 10x budget increase.

Slash it in half, give the slashed half to NASA.

Then we can have ourselves a Pluto colony.

Meanwhile people are still dying for lack of access to healthcare, infrastructure is failing, education is remaining poor...

I agree with the slash the defense budget part, but NASA doesn't need 300B/y (and would have a hard time spending it even). They need ~30B/y (i.e. double their existing outlay) to do SLS and continue existing operations, and it needs to be in a lockbox of some kind such that future political swings require a huge amount of horsepower to disrupt it (like a congressional super majority vote).

Money spent on NASA has provided significant breakthroughs in science that includes the internet, MRIs, ear thermometers, automatic insulin pumps, implantable heart defibrillators, fiber optics, light emitting diodes for brain cancer surgery, programmable cataracts, long distance telescopes, solar energy, artificial limbs, memory foam, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, water filters, enriched food, and tons of software.

Smoke alarms alone have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

"NASA did not invent the smoke detector. NASA's connection to the modern smoke detector is that it made one with adjustable sensitivity as part of the Skylab project. The device was made commercially available by Honeywell. The consumer could use it to avoid "nuisance" alarms while cooking. Like the quartz clock, this device is no longer available. "

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/home/mythbuster/myth_barcod...

edit: actually pretty much none of the things you listed were invented by NASA, several predate its existence.

Yes, they just need steady funding and a process that ensures that the money is spent on worthwhile stuff. After plans have been vetted then the politicians can come in and distribute the money to their districts.

The area where they get things done is unmanned spaceflight. Politicians don't care for that so the people at NASA can just do their work without meddling.

I don't think they have got anything interesting done in manned spaceflight lately.

The manned spaceflight portion of NASA doesn't really get anything done.

> I wish they would commit to something and actually finish it.

I think this is pretty well hopeless at the moment. Major NASA projects have a timeline and cost operating on a 10+ year scale, but their budget changes annually and their priorities change with presidential election.

Really the only way I can see things improving is if a president managed to stake out a task that couldn't be taken away from them by the next one. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that, either - budget it all up front and tell them to buy gold bars with the money they'll need later?

It may work if during one administration they planned a program that is coherent and actually funded. All the initiatives over the last decade(s?) didn't make sense and were not even funded. In short, they didn't even try.

For some reason the unmanned missions are managed much better. I do a lot of reading about them and all the decisions, trade offs and plans seem to be the result of careful and realistic planning.

> For some reason the unmanned missions are managed much better.

I think it's largely because they don't have so much safety-related red tape. Loosing a robot is not nearly as big of a deal as loosing a human.