Is NASA a Spent Force in Space Exploration?

[Elderberry]

MindMatters 9/14/2024

A government report implies it is, as private groups are moving into the space business and China is catching up quickly

Science writer Joel Achenbach reported last Tuesday in the Washington Post that NASA — which once had men walking on the moon — is in a slump:

    NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The Apollo era, with its huge taxpayer investment, is a distant memory. The agency now pursues complex missions on inadequate budgets.

    This may be an unsustainable path for NASA, one that imperils long-term success. That is the conclusion of a sweeping report, titled “NASA at a Crossroads,” written by a committee of aerospace experts and published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

    The report suggests that NASA prioritizes near-term missions and fails to think strategically. In other words, the space agency isn’t sufficiently focused on the future.

    Joel Achenbach, “Underfunded, aging NASA may be on unsustainable path, report warns,” Washington Post, September 10, 2024

NASA is outsourcing a good deal now to private industry. The trouble is, it’s hard to attract creative engineers to a job supervising the work of others. The report recommended spending more time on technology development and workforce training and less on costly missions to moons and Mars.

It’s worth asking, is this a slump that NASA can pull out of?

In the United States, private groups are moving into the space business and China is catching up quickly, developing its own moon missions. Maybe the NASA model is a part of history.

More: https://mindmatters.ai/2024/09/is-nasa-a-spent-force-in-space-exploration/