THE NEW SPACE RACE: Report highlights severe infrastructure challenges at NASA.

“The extensive consultations, site visits, and interviews conducted in the course of the study lead the committee to conclude that NASA stands at a crossroads,” the report concluded. “The underpinnings of the unique and critical capabilities the agency provides to the United States are eroding and will be inevitably lost if certain trends are not reversed.”

The report highlighted problems in three key areas: infrastructure, workforce and technology development. They ranged from attracting and retaining a skilled workforce to aging facilities at NASA centers visited by committee members that were “some of the worst facilities many of its members have ever seen.” The report also highlighted a lack of long-term planning to guide investments in technology and infrastructure.

The report concluded that much of that had to do with budget pressures that forced the agency to prioritize spending on specific missions and projects at the expense of spending on mission support. The amount of NASA’s budget spent on mission support declined from 20% in 2013 to 14% in 2023.

That stems from having more projects on its books than funding for them, said Norm Augustine, retired chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin and chair of the committee, in a Sept. 10 webinar about the report. “NASA’s solution to the problem has been to underinvest in infrastructure and so on in the future. That tactic, frankly, has run out of gas.”

NASA has a budget of about $25.4 billion and requires a budget of probably no less than $30 billion to fully fund Artemis (and still get us back to the moon late) — and that doesn’t include delayed infrastructure spending.

The Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (which has done little for infrastructure and less for private-sector jobs) cost more than 40 times what NASA needs.