NASA Urged to Boost R&D at Expense of Near-Term Missions

NASA’s long-term success requires the agency to invest in R&D, scientists, and infrastructure, even at the expense of initiating new missions, says a new report from the National Academies.

Congress requested the consensus study report, titled “NASA at a Crossroads,” as part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to review the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA’s long-term strategic goals and mission objectives.

The report concludes that to avoid a “hollow future” for NASA and keep up with increasing international competition, particularly from China, NASA must rebalance its priorities – even if that means making some difficult choices.

“In an opportunity-rich environment, such as NASA has confronted over the years, the choice has too frequently been to pursue near-term missions at the expense of investing in the ostensibly invisible foundational assets of the organization,” the report states. “The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place.”

Insufficient funding and uncertainty surrounding NASA’s long-term budget are highlighted in the report as “often incompatible with the scope, complexity, and difficulty” of the agency’s work. The report notes that NASA’s budget for missions as a percentage of its total budget has increased from 79% to 85%, while its mission support budget has decreased from 20% to 14% in recent years. This means that “each dollar of mission support that previously had to sustain a dollar of mission activity now has to support $1.50 of mission activity, effectively a 50% increase.”

The report highlights that NASA faces greater competition for scientists and engineers from the private sector, which frequently offers better pay, benefits, and work flexibility. The growth of the space economy also means NASA is no longer the only employer offering “challenging hands-on work in the field of space exploration,” the report says.

The report recommends that NASA “aggressively increase investment in internal research and development to advance early-stage, future mission critical technologies that are not commercially available.” It also recommends that the agency grow its in-house technical competencies by avoiding outsourcing early-stage activities to contractors.

“The nation cannot afford to have NASA just become a funding agency for industry,” said Lester Lyles, report committee member and chair of the NASA Advisory Council, during a webinar on the findings of the report this week. Lyles emphasized the importance of the NASA workforce understanding what they are developing instead of simply outsourcing everything to industry partners. Finding the right balance with industrial partners can be achieved through contracts and cooperation, but NASA needs to address that balance quickly, said Lyles.

Aging infrastructure is becoming a major issue for NASA (as it is for several other science agencies including the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology) with 83% of its facilities now past their design life, the report states. The report recommends that NASA work with Congress to establish a Working Capital Fund to help eliminate NASA’s $3.3 billion maintenance backlog over the next decade. It suggests an annual contribution of about $600 million would meet NASA’s property repair and renewal goals through fiscal year 2028.

“The bottom line of all this would be to say that, for NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Norm Augustine, report committee chair and former Lockheed Martin CEO, during the webinar. “The concerns that it faces are ones that have built up over decades. NASA truly is, in our view, at a crossroads.”