Amidst a harrowing series of cuts to science agencies across the federal government, NASA has maintained its budget better than many peer institutions. Core science and technology agencies like the CDC and NSF arguably provide more critical services to the public, yet NASA has better staved off the indiscriminate budgetary scythe swung by Russ Vought and other authoritarians in the Trump regime. There are likely many factors for why that is the case: the recent success of Artemis, the locations of many NASA centers and contractors in Republican congressional districts, greater political capital that NASA can bring to bear in Washington than other smaller agencies. But regardless of the specific reasons for its comparative stability, NASA provides an opportunity, even for timid Democratic politicians who are overly sensitive to the vagaries of polls and consultant opinions, to use NASA as a testing ground for a new vision of government—one filled with hope and determination and innovation.
The extent to which NASA is a force of innovation in the world has always been a question of will, not of technical capability. In the 1960s its budget peaked at $70B—4.5% of the federal budget and equivalent to about $720B today— whereas $100B would be about 2% of the current federal budget. The ’60s era Apollo spending was probably not sustainable forever, but the point is that we could quadruple the current $25B without even approaching historical budgetary extremes. That increase seems even more reasonable when you compare it to what Trump and Russ Vought have done with agencies like ICE: increasing its budget from $6B prior to Trump to a projected $85B. So, yeah.
Of course ICE and its indiscriminate slush fund of cash is not a model for how to go about increasing the NASA budget. Instead, NASA already has its long term goals and priorities mapped out through the Decadal Survey process. The top priority is of course vastly expanding and accelerating anything related to climate monitoring and research, which private industry has tried and failed to do for profit. Then, the same goes for solar system exploration: refunding Mars Sample Return, sending out as many extra-planetary probes as we can as fast as we can build them to places like Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Venus, and any other scientific target of interest. NASA has shown, through projects like the Mars rovers and a pioneering series of space telescopes, that sometimes you just have to explore the unknown before you can perfectly quantify just what you might learn. That’s not even mentioning Artemis, which although is lower science value compared to climate or extra-planetary exploration, does play a significant role in inspiring the public and pushing human spaceflight forward. Just investing in what NASA already wants to do could easily push the budget toward $50B+ with room to grow as principal investigators across the country see their efforts rewarded.
In parallel with funding all of the promising projects that scientists across the country are chomping at the bit to work on, NASA should also begin an effort to deprivatize the aerospace industry. Although there are plenty of ways in which the private sector can reasonably play a positive role in space exploration, corporations now have an outsized say in how the United States operates in space. SpaceX controls basically all of our launch capability; several companies are attempting to privatize the space station; defense contractors build many of the satellites that we launch. The workers at these companies who built great engineering products should be monetarily rewarded as their organizations are pulled back into the fold , but the CEOs and billionaires like Musk and Bezos should be cut out altogether.
As part of a larger effort to rebuild a government for and by the people, and to cut out rampant corruption that lines the pockets of billionaires, funding NASA into a new era of exploration would serve as a model for how to do the same in other parts of government. The specifics of reaching $100B likely depend on the scientific community’s reaction to the available funding, but just with projects like the Mars Sample Return mission, vastly increased scope for climate science and monitoring, and additional solar system exploration missions could bring the budget to $50B-$75 in the next 2-6 years. In proposing such a large budget increase, aimed both at doing more science and mitigating the influence of corporations, Democrats can of course point out that NASA is a net positive for the economy. While that is true, and it may help push such a paradigmatic shift through Congress, painting NASA as simply another unit of economic expansion misses the entire vision of the agency and the reason it is popular: exploration and discovery, bringing to bear the best of human impulses into practical projects that expand our knowledge of the universe, all the while reminding us what good government can do.
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