A dim view of the future of funding for space exploration

Dr. John M. Logsdon does not paint a very optimistic picture of the future of funding for space exploration. Logsdon, considered the dean of space policy and the founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, gave a talk titled “What Do We Expect of a Space Program?” today at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Dr. John Logsdon speaking Jan. 5, 2015, at the 225th
meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Logsdon pulled the title of his lecture from a line in a Nixon Administration memo about the future of the space program. He says a big part of the problem is that, in more than four decades since the memo, the underlying question has not been adequately answered.

Logsdon pins much of the blame for the situation on President Nixon, who scaled back funding for NASA after the race to the Moon was won.

“The decisions he made from the ’69 through ’71 period, culminating in the January 5, 1972 announcement of the approval of the space shuttle, really characterized the program that NASA executed for the next 40-plus years, and basically avoided answering the question ‘What do we expect?’ by developing capabilities rather than seeking goals,” Logsdon said.

We had the answer under President Kennedy, according to Logsdon, when the goal was not just to put people on the Moon, but to achieve preeminence about all things in outer space.

“What is distinctive about Kennedy is he not only talked the talk, but he walked the walk,” Logsdon said. “He made a commitment of human and financial resources, peaceful but warlike mobilization of resources, to carry out that program of preeminence.”

Logsdon pointed out that the budget for NASA was $964 million when JFK urged the US to go the Moon; it had ballooned to $5.2 billion by 1965. Space science shared in the growth, its part of the NASA budget going from $131 million to $767 million in the same time frame.

Logsdon is tackling the history of presidential support for space exploration in his scholarship. He published John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon in 2010. His new book, After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, is due out in March. The latter goes into great detail about Nixon’s approach and its lasting impact.

While NASA’s budget has fluctuated over the years, Logsdon sees a silver lining in the nation’s investment in science.

“The ups and downs in the overall NASA budget are not reflected in the budget for space science, which has shown a rather gradual but steady increase for the past 25 or 30 years, and has not vacillated,” he said. “Compared to the human spaceflight part of NASA, the space science, robotic science program, including Earth science, is in pretty good shape and is not being argued about.”

Logsdon served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which opined in 2003 that NASA was being forced to do too much without adequate resources. He said that’s still a problem. The reason he doesn’t see a good solution ahead is that there are three possible responses, two of which he views as unlikely. He doesn’t foresee a great increase in our ambitions or some Sputnik-like incident that creates urgency about space. Nor does he anticipate a significant increase in spending, though that could depend in part on who the next president turns out to be.

“The most likely outcome is that we just keep muddling along, as we have since 1971, with a suboptimal program,” he concluded.

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