In 2009, one of the first orders of business for self-proclaimed Scientist-In-Chief President Obama was to cancel NASA's Constellation project.
He said he wanted to 'go bigger' but given the hostility of his campaign, politically agnostic people knew what it meant - he was no Nixon, he was never going to allow a program with his predecessor's name on it to get off the ground, so the Constellation had to die to spite Bush. NASA has never really recovered from such overt politicization of science but the problems were evident before that.
By then, the James Webb Space Telescope had already shown they were no longer capable of doing Big Things on budget or on schedule. They did finally manage to launch the JWST, and it takes nice pictures a few hundred light years farther than Hubble, but that was after a 1000% increase in cost and 20 years of delay. I predicted that Congress would allow no more 'too big to fail' programs and I was right. That is why the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover has been scrapped. Though "slated" to have an already delayed launch by the end of this year, it isn't even close to being ready. It went from $450 million in the last cost increase to a projected $610 million, and that was enough to get it canceled.
How to waste $400 million of someone else's money. And to make matters worse, the people in government who can't even get this done on time and budget are getting their student loans forgiven, because they claim it is 'public service.' Credit: NASA
NASA has a budget and when cost overruns happen in one program, a whole lot of others get delayed. That was the issue with VIPER. A 30% increase meant half a dozen smaller experiments were going to be denied. It's probably for the best.
Cute robots on Mars? Sure. Overpriced satellites to tell us China is still polluting the planet? Of course. Just nothing big, because NASA has become a progressive job works program with a political mandate that has nothing to do with science or engineering beyond it being a by-product.(1) They're not the bold adventurers of the 1960s, they're zero-defects government union employees where even easy jobs have a 50% joint confidence level if taxpayers are lucky. So maybe the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will still happen. Maybe not. NASA is in no rush, they are government. And that is the problem.
After Obama canceled the Bush program, it took NASA 12 years to even launch an unmanned drone around the moon. That means it took 25% longer for modern NASA to do what the original NASA did from scratch, plus landing humans on Luna. For 12 grand the private sector can put my cremated ashes on the moon but for billions each year it will be until 2045 until NASA can do that.
True believers will invoke the tired 'military spending is X' and 'we are losing leadership' rhetoric(2) but it's fine to let other countries show leadership. When Democrats were gutting nuclear energy and endorsing alternative medicine in the 1990s, they also canceled the Supeconducting Super Collider. Europe built the Large Hadron Collider instead. Would the SSC have been better? Sure, except it still might not be built, because the US government struggles to get out of its own way. It is not leadership to waste money, it is leadership to let someone else do that.
NOTES:
(1) Basically, like the Secret Service being unable to crawl onto a moderately sloped roof to stop a presidential assassin because the checklist for hiring adds in a whole lot of characteristics that have nothing to do with a job like 'stop assassins.'
(2) Now they can invoke 'we just gave $4 trillion to government union employees in a stimulus plan' and 'the interest on the deficit alone is $900 million' but they won't, because the people who think centralized government planning is the only way science and engineering get done voted for the political party that did both those things.
