http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/scienceandtech/columns/for...
There are two reasons NASA does not get more support.
1) The science community circles the wagons around everything. Have we wasted $5 billion doing 'STEM outreach' to convince try and smart people they should be physicists instead of doctors? Yes, we have. But when a fiscal hawk like Senator Tom Coburn says we'd have more money for science if we stopped with duplication among a dozen agencies, the science community circled the wagons around waste and duplication and 'studies' of Everquest, and simply talked about how anti-science Republicans are. Coburn is an MD who was in recovery from cancer, you can bet he understands the true value of science more than 99% of science bloggers. Academia and bloggers with academic envy make everything political.
But that is a bad plan. If the science community does not police what is good science and what should not be funded by the National Science Foundation, then we are not being trusted guides for the public. The public loses interest in trying to figure out what is important when everything is called vital. Honestly, it isn't all vital.
If it were all vital, the science community would have criticized President Obama when he canceled the Constellation program in order to replace it with something that had his name on it - something that is not close to being ready and probably never will be. Why? Because there is now a precedent for canceling space programs if the previous president started it.
If Richard Nixon had been as divisive and contemptuous of science as President Obama, we would never have landed on the moon. He would have canceled it because it had a Democrats name on it.
2) NASA is a job works program that is hand-cuffed by the federal government that keeps it alive.
The biggest myth NASA perpetuates is that they landed on the moon. In reality, the private sector landed on the moon, NASA existed to spend money. After the Mercury program virtually nothing was done by government science - and for the Mercury program, the specification NASA handed to companies like IBM was laughable. Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, probably the best engineer of the original seven astronauts, joked that he was sitting on top of parts that had all been built by the lowest bidder, but the lowest bidder among defense contractors was still really good. Once the bureaucracy became the thing, all contractors became political and we got the famous $200 toilet seats we ridiculed years ago. Technology no longer matters.
Today, NASA is a bloated bureaucracy that is allowed to take no risks. They instead have to think about whether or not every program has a picture of a team with the right minorities in it. No mission can happen if there is any risk of anyone being hurt. NASA people know this is not right, any number of astronauts want to take risks, and people love cute robots on Mars. Imagine how much they would love a person on Mars.
But given its current restrictions, NASA can't go back to the moon in twice as many years as it took to go the first time, when none of the equipment had even been created. Mars might as well be Alpha Centauri.
3) People are not convinced we need to go into space. Back to a cute robot on Mars, what exactly would a person do that is superior? Nothing anyone can fathom.
If people are not going into space, why do we need a NASA at all? To know that there is still no life on Venus? To send out press releases every time there is a solar flare? No one seriously thinks NASA could mobilize to stop an incoming asteroid until about 8 years after one hit and that is the only thing people see as value.
We don't need people in space to do science, and without that we don't need NASA.
How to fix it? Stop protecting bad programs
We don't have Big Physics in America. For good or bad. The bad will be that we didn't build the LHC - but the LHC got built anyway. Scientists circle the wagons around the idea and say strange things like we will lose 'leadership' if we don't fund this or that, but if you ask anyone if you can buy leadership, they will rightly say you cannot.
The Superconducting SuperCollider was the last big physics project in America because it was hopelessly behind budget and behind schedule - it wanted to be another NASA, but without the mindshare of the public. It got canceled. But it only got canceled because there was no Big Physics to protect it. Now let's look at the James Webb Space Telescope, also hopelessly over budget and behind schedule. Every year that the JWST remains behind schedule, 50 other projects get delayed or cut or scaled back because NASA is NASA.
If there were no NASA, the next project done by the Curiosity team - yes, science would get done without a giant wall of federal union members, like it does in every other field - would get funded while the people who misled Congress on the time and budget of the JWST in order to make it Too Big To Fail would be finding employment elsewhere.
It does not take $10 billion to do everything that needs doing. I am not picking on telescopes but if you ask the public how much better JWST will be than Hubble, they will have no idea. Astronomers mumble platitudes about being able to see farther 'back in time', which is the sort of hocus-pocus verbage that annoys taxpayers.
