Space Policy Guru John Logsdon Has Good News and Bad News On NASA Funding

MarkWhittington writes According to a story in Medium, Dr. John Logsdon, considered the dean of space policy, addressed a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. The author of a book on President Kennedy's decision to go to the moon and an upcoming book on President Nixon's post-Apollo space policy decisions had some good news and some bad news about NASA funding. The good news is that funding for the space agency is not likely to be slashed below its current $18 billion a year. The bad news is that it is not likely to go up much beyond that. If Logsdon is correct, static NASA funding will mean that beyond low Earth orbit human space exploration will remain an unrealistic aspiration. American astronauts will not return to the moon, not to mention go to Mars, in the foreseeable future.

Comments

Re:Just cancel one or two unneeded weapon systems

[DarkOx]

Better yet we could cut those weapons programs and use the savings to fill in existing budget holes and just reduce the deficit.

Lets face it, geek love of space aside NASA isn't really a very good use of the public's resources. We have done a lot and learned a lot its time to put it back on self for a while until we solve some big energy problems.

All that stuff about astroid mining and such is at this time ridiculous because of the energy inputs required. When someone figures out a potential energy source that isn't a million dollars worth of ecologically destructive chemicals that can both get something out of earths gravity and power useful activity once its out there it will be time to go back to space. Building a slightly better can to put people and things in is the easy part, we can do that whenever.