CBO’s Prescription for NASA: “Do Less”

“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is confronting the difficult task of squeezing a program that it anticipated would cost about $95 billion for five years into a budget plan allowing just over $70 billion,” announces a Congressional Budget Office study on “Reinventing NASA.” The CBO, Congress’s budget arm, prepared the study for the House science committee. It was released by committee chairman George Brown on March 24. (see FYI #49 for Brown’s comments.)

The CBO study analyzes the risks of NASA’s approach to dealing with new budget realities, and provides three examples of alternative programs that would fit within a flat five-year budget. According to the study, NASA has chosen a two-pronged strategy to adapt to the fiscal constraints: The space agency plans to marginally adjust the contents of its program by scaling down, stretching out, and canceling some activities, and to do more with fewer dollars by improving management and efficiency.

CBO finds fault with both components of NASA’s strategy. Trying to maintain NASA’s whole portfolio of missions, CBO says, “risks delay, mission failure, and the loss of anticipated benefits.” It notes three characteristics of NASA projects that make this strategy unlikely to be effective: high fixed costs, large mission operations and data analysis (MO&DA) requirements late in the life of projects, and NASA’s tendency to consistently underestimate the cost of projects. CBO states that many of the techniques to improve efficiency, such as management and procurement reforms, total quality management, and increased cooperation with the private sector, “have merit.” However, the study points out that conclusive evidence is lacking that it would “dramatically reduce the cost of [NASA’s] programs.”

While the CBO study specifically says that it “makes no recommendation,” it offers the following suggestion: “If NASA’s problem is trying to do too much with too few dollars, one solution is to do less.” It provides three “illustrative alternatives,” that would focus NASA’s activities more narrowly around certain of its historical missions while reducing or omitting other missions. Each alternative would have an annual cost over the next five years of $14.3 billion or less.

The first alternative, for $14.3 billion a year, emphasizes piloted spaceflight. Robotic space science would be reduced, and efforts would be concentrated on the space station, and new technologies for future piloted exploration of the solar system.

The second option, for $11 billion a year, would cancel the space station and emphasize space-related research. Robotic space science would receive the majority of emphasis, with piloted spaceflight funded only for scientific purposes.

The third option, for $7 billion a year, would maintain funding for robotic space science, but at a lower level, and emphasize new technology development to improve the competitiveness of the U.S. space industry. The space station would be eliminated, as would all piloted spaceflight.

Copies of the study can be obtained from CBO’s Publications Office at (202) 226-2809.