Fifty-four years ago, NASA emerged from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and other military operations to remain a competitive player in an ever-evolving global space race. Over the next 15 years, NASA, funded with 4% of the US GDP, made giant leaps for mankind. This brought a large amount of national pride, and demonstrated US superiority both in space and on the ground, as many commercial spin-off's reached the marketplace. Many of the original mission designs and plans were conceived of by NASA civil servants (i.e. government employees). What’s often forgotten is that of the commercial partners and NASA contractors that helped to make these audacious plans a reality, a good fraction of the initial budget from NASA trickled down into private companies. This model of funding, including research and development to companies and universities, has continued to this day and is no different than any other government agency. Let’s face it, NASA was created to demonstrate U.S. technological superiority and then later took on the goal of beating the Russians to the Moon. In the process, 12 humans slipped the surly bonds of Earth, progress in science was made, and generations of people were inspired to work on ambitious goals in space and on the ground, myself included. Fast-forward to the present, the Apollo days (and dollars) are gone, and NASA now operates on a yearly budget of about 0.5% of the U.S. GDP.

Let’s get real. Large, bold, expensive, and ambitious projects on the scale of NASA’s are rarely, if ever, led and funded by private companies. These projects are funded and directed by the advisors of kings and queens, nation states, governments, and multi-national organizations. There is little profit to be made in doing big exploration projects, and the financial barrier to entry is often way too high for a company to stomach. However, there is money to be made in supporting large projects, which is why the government-led/contractor-fed model works pretty well in most cases. It is then the goal of National Research Councils to advise the various government agencies on priorities and both short-term and long-term initiatives. In any case, NASA has a fraction of the budget it used to have. Averaged out, every man, woman, and child in the U.S. pays $60 per person per year to support NASA at its current (FY2011) funded rate. To put that into comparison, the U.S. Post Office receives about $225 per person per year in the U.S. Sure, overall, NASA has a large budget of $18.4 billion per year, but averaged out per person and compared to the entire federal discretionary budget of the U.S., NASA (and the post office) is a drop in the bucket.

That said, there are still bold projects being undertaken by private companies. Multi-millionaires and billionaires have started many of them, but they are also backed by NASA and other government agencies. Some private space firms have lofty goals of getting to Mars (SpaceX), flying people around the moon (Space Adventures), and flying people up into space on suborbital trajectories (Virgin Galactic). However, all of these ventures require some sort of day-to-day income to keep the lights on and keep a small army of engineers and scientists employed. SpaceX has adopted a model of capturing the market share in the rocket launch business and also re-supplying the International Space Station (NASA funded). Space Adventures maintains a commercial aircraft that flies over the Gulf of Mexico in parabolic arcs to achieve weightlessness for its passengers for 30 seconds (partially NASA funded) and sends tourist astronauts to the ISS (several government space agencies and the European Space Agency funded the ISS).

The point is, all of these companies aspire to complete grand projects, but they rely on funding support from NASA and other government agencies to do so. Without NASA and other government funding, many of these private companies would already be out of business or wouldn’t exist in the first place.

NASA does, however, suffer from the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome. The organization could be made more effective than it already is if it followed more closely the recommendations of the decadal surveys completed by the National Research Council instead of changing the directions of its large programs depending on the opinions of the current Congress and administration. When President Kennedy set a bold vision for NASA back in 1961, the U.S. Congress backed this plan with 4% of the U.S. GDP. Without this sort of steady direction and financial backing, we as a nation can’t afford to do things like develop the next heavy-lift rocket, or send people to asteroids or Mars within the next 15 years. However, if we make strategic long-term investments in science and technology development that fit within a realistic budget, we can still accomplish many worthy goals like human deep-space exploration or enhanced outer solar system robotic exploration, just on a longer timescale. NASA, a publicly entity, is the best vehicle to fund and set the direction of the U.S. space program while private companies have and will continue to carry out these ambitious goals.

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