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Support For NASA Spending Depends On Perception of Size of Space Agency Budget
MarkWhittington writes "Alan Steinberg, a post doctorate fellow in political science at Sam Houston State University, conducted a study surrounding the vexing problem of how to motivate more people to support increased levels of funding for NASA. In an October 14, 2013 piece in The Space Review, Steinberg announced the results of a study conducted with a group of college students. Steinberg's approach was based on the findings of a study by Roger Launius conducted in the late 1990s that suggested that the American public believe that NASA spending takes up about 20 percent of the federal budget. It has in fact never exceeded four percent, which it enjoyed at the height of the Apollo program, and is currently about .5 percent. Steinberg was testing a notion advanced by Neil deGrasse Tyson that if people knew the true size of NASA's budget they would be more likely to support increasing it."
The public has no idea about the level of US spending. They need to know things like Air Conditioning The Military Costs More Than NASA's Entire Budget. Until they understand that NASA does so much for so little they will never want to expand its budget.
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In the hope that the principles in this study are correct, I made this little micro-site to quickly answer the question: "Why spend money on space when there are problems here at home?" http://www.ridingwithrobots.org/earth
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
There are some things that are best developed by government due to cost, risk and lack of a valid business case for profit that drives private enterprise. Of course, it should be handed over to private enterprise as soon as a business case is found.
How long will it be before there is a business reason to go to Mars? I'm thinking a LONG time.. So NASA is a reasonable expense, if you have the money.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The problem is NASA's obsession with manned spaceflight. The best work is done unmanned, and it's way less expensive. Toss the astronaut suits and use the whole budget for unmanned missions.
Manned spaceflight only makes sense with a huge breakthrough in propulsion. Otherwise, there is no where to go where a human being would be useful enough to make it worthwhile. As it stands, manned flight serves only to fulfill fanboy Star Trek fantasies.
Until then, I will be a techie steadfastly against more NASA spending. Its not just the general public you need to convince, its at least some of the STEM people too.
Poll respondents always favor nonspecific measures like "cutting government spending." Then it reverses when you ask about specific programs, especially the ones that actually cost a lot, like DoD and Social Security.
The public has no idea about the level of US spending.
Here is a breakdown on where out money goes.Defense, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP - where 2/3rds goes to Medicare.
The perception is that our tax money is wasted on Space, Welfare Queen's Pink Cadillacs and other entitlement programs which I take to be code words for giving money to "lazy (Black) poor people" from folks who want to appear to be PC.
When the truth is we are wasting money on wars and transferring wealth to the old.
And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted, they'd have to shoot themselves in the pocketbook and give up this notion the the US of A has to have a superior military and go off fighting "evil".
Cut military spending to post WWII levels. Stop this one man show when containing roque nations - we need more UN involvement; which is a whole other bugaboo with the Teaparty people and most conservatives.
Every individual defense program is a tiny fraction of the whole budget. You can slice anything up enough so it's a tiny fraction. We should stop spending so many tiny fractions.
Funding for space exploration may be good for a country that isn't $17 Trillion in debt. Or a country with a balanced budget. Or a rich country with a healthy economy. For a country like the US, it's just part of the problem -- albeit only a tiny fraction of the problem.
The US economy has never been stronger or more productive. The government debt issues are mostly due to the unwillingness to raise taxes. We have plenty of room for large, ambitious, high-risk, high-payoff projects. We just have to decide to do them! We gotta hurry up already. Life is getting boring! The best and brightest minds are working on web advertising and stock trading.
20%? They're probably confusing it with the NSA.
Since you bring up ROI, I would have to agree that the money spent on Apollo has ultimately resulted in more money going into the American economy and in the long run far more economic activity from the resulting technology developed than if the money had simply been refunded to the tax payers for them to spend on Super Bowl tickets and other frivolous things. That said, how much of that kind of extreme cutting edge technology is being developed at NASA at the moment?
Computer technology for NASA missions is using not just yesterday's technology, but even a generation or two even further back. To give an example, the computer being used for the New Horizons spacecraft (currently enroute to Pluto) has the same CPU (admittedly radiation hardened and a bit more robust) that the Sony Playstation One uses. The Space Shuttle guidance computers were 16-bit computers that were about as powerful as the original IBM-PCs.
The SLS program seems to be a reboot to the Apollo program. The engines on the SLS are going to use the Space Shuttle Main Engines (literally.... they are using the very same engines that were used on the now retired shuttles and will throw them away in the Atlantic when the 1st stage is used). They are even reviewing the J-2 engine that the Saturn V used for its 2nd stage.
I could go on, but my point is that so little is really breaking new ground and pushing technology that I fail to see what NASA is actually doing at the moment that is worth even the limited funds it is receiving at the moment. From a ROI perspective, there basically isn't any.
That is Zero point five percent or a half of a percent, not five percent. It was only that high (about 4%-5%) during the Apollo program with the race to the Moon, and hasn't even been close to that funding level for decades.
A repost of a Google+ post I wrote a year and some change ago:
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From today forward, all federal government expenditures will be priced in "Iraq War Days" (IWD) or "Iraq War Years" (IWY). For quick reference:
Source: "United States Federal budget, 2012" and "Mars Science Laboratory" pages on Wikipedia for budgets, google.com/publicdata for US population, National Priorities Project via "Cost of War" Wikipedia page for IWD exchange rate.
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Something I didn't note in my original post that's probably worth mentioning in passing: Social Security is huge, "bigger than the National Defense budget" huge, but it's basically self-funding because it's a retirement investment paid for by payroll taxes (modulo population bumps, e.g. the post-WW2 "baby boom"). Person A pays in, person A cashes out, theoretical net cost to taxpayers $0.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
That may be true, but in the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of computing technology. The Apollo Guidance Computer was nearly the very first major device built with integrated circuits. So many chips were used by NASA that it represented something like 60%-70% of the global production for computer chips at the time and one of the reasons why many people associated NASA with computer technology. NASA also created the first real-time operating systems, as well as the notion of a time-share system that would have multiple users concurrently using the same computer resources. Web servers are a lasting legacy to this early technology. There was a time that NASA really did push the technology and got software and computer engineers to really do things, very basic and fundamental things, that had never been done before and helped advance the industry in ways that still are being impacted by those efforts.
While I will admit that Velcro and Tang (much less the Fischer Space Pen) had nothing to do with NASA other than NASA used all of those items, there certainly were many advances in technology that happened when NASA really pushed the boundaries. It really is remarkable realizing just how little was known about the Moon in 1961 when Kennedy made his famous speech about going to the Moon "before this decade is out". Even when the Gemini flights were happening, there was still debate going on about how many of the craters on the Moon were volcanic vents as opposed to impact craters (some apparently are, but far fewer than was thought at the time). Theories like the Late Heavy Bombardment simply had never even been considered until after the astronauts actually got to the Moon and were really examining the features up close.
My point is that NASA is no longer in the forefront of pushing technology like it was doing in the 1960's. As a result, while there certainly are some interesting things that NASA is still doing, it is just a shadow of what it was like. Simply dumping money into NASA isn't going to change that either.
Oh, I think there still are some things NASA could be doing that could really push the frontiers of technology in a similar fashion. The NAUTLUS-X spaceship (yes, spaceship as opposed to spacecraft) is one of those wacky off the wall things that IMHO should be getting much more support to actually get built. A real space program with a strong vision for what it should be doing is another. There just hasn't been a president since LBJ that cared to do any of that, which is why NASA is just a lame government agency right now.
If people knew the budget for the military, would they support it less?
I'd really like to see someone start OSSEA, the Open Source Space Exploration Association. Get Neil Degrasse Tyson as the spokesperson and a few other space and science luminaries and use kickstarter or similar to find each project. Accept volunteers. Put all data collected online.
No idea if it would work but I use would be neat to see them try. I'd donate money and possibly donate time as well being open source