How about three cents for NASA?

01/27/13 21:01:00    

By Michael Mealling

In the space community one organization that's been quite vocal lately is Penny4NASA which is advocating for more than doubling NASA's budget from 0.48% of the Federal Budget to a whole 1%. The idea behind the name is that of overy dollar American's are spending in taxes they should be able to spare one penny for NASA.

Setting aside the fact that its not a penny because we are borrowing about 1/3 of our federal spending. That means of that whole penny we are borrowing one third from someone else.

But what if there were a way to not just double NASA's budget but triple or even quadruple it?

Penny4NASA's goal is to increase what NASA can do. I'm confident their goal isn't just the transfer of cash. The idea is to have enough cash to do something useful. Something BIG. There are two ways to do that: increase revenue or decrease costs. Penny4NASA seems to think the only way of doing that is to increase revenue.

I'm going to examine decreasing costs.

Lets start with decreasing launch costs. Both SpaceX's development and operational costs are at least three times cheaper than NASA. The NAFCOM reports lists SpaceX as spending a bit more than $300 million. If done by NASA using the same processes it is currently using for the Space Launch System the cost would be $3.6 billion.

That's more than TEN TIMES the cost.

But it is comparing apples and oranges. The Falcon Heavy is estimated at 120,000 lbs to LEO and the SLS is targeting 150,000 to a truly monstrous 280,000 lbs. Both have a 5 meter diameter fairing. But such a rocket necessary? If you can assemble a space station with a Falcon 9, service and refuel a satellite, and launch an interplanetary vehicle without needing 280,000 lbs of payload capacity, why do it?

The estimated costs for SLS through 2025 are $40 billion (give or take a few billion). NASA's budget through that period is $204 billion. That means SLS will be sucking up slightly less than 20% of NASA's budget.

So think on this: cancel SLS and rework NASA's missions slightly to use commercial launchers and voila! you have not just doubled but tripled NASA's available budget, not buy giving it more money, but by cutting its costs. And in a world where sequestration looks more and more likely accomplishing more with less. Do THAT and the American taxpayer will be ecstatic! Do that and they might, just might trust you with more (assuming there's more available).