Personal & Professional Opinion Posts
This is an archive of short personal and professional opinion pieces that aims to share interesting thoughts, insights, and takeaways on niche topics. Posts are intended for informational purposes.
The Politics of Space: A Retrospective from a Former NASA Intern
My internship at NASA was a memorable experience that I will remember probably my entire life. The feeling of walking into the historic Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, TX was exciting and overwhelming. JSC is the heart of the manned spaced program that helped manage and control space programs such as Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz. It is home to the Saturn V rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown till this day!
Despite these incredible feats, I did not expect the buildings and facilities within the JSC campus to be poorly maintained. The buildings were old and lacked renovations that were desperately needed. Elevators and air handlers had issues that caused accessibility issues for some buildings. There was clearly a lack of funding for infrastructure improvements.
So why does such a culturally significant organization lack such funding?
Congress.
In the middle of my internship, my manager warned me that our work could possibly be halted due to a government freeze. This usually happens when congress cannot decide on budgetary agreements for its agencies and the rest of the government. With these issues prevalent in NASA's history, it is no wonder why it has taken the agency so long to go back to the moon. This was not the case in the 1960s.
After the Cold War, the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was ignited. This caused funding to flood into NASA and its space programs. With John F. Kennedy's bold claim that the U.S. was going to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This politically-driven space race helped to bolster NASA's budgets and employment. Based off History.com, "From 1961 to 1964, NASA’s budget was increased almost 500 percent, and the lunar landing program eventually involved some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors."
Nowadays, NASA's budget has decreased from its highs in the 1960s and is more so considered a customer of space services from private companies like SpaceX instead of developing those services in-house. It is clear that NASA is taking a backseat while the private sector is spearheading space commercialism. With inflation and foreign conflicts stirring up the political climate, NASA's budgets appear to be a lower priority to government. Politics and space go hand in hand. There may need to be significant foreign competition or a threat to the U.S. space industry in order for funding to flood into NASA once more. And even so, who is telling how long that funding lasts until the political climate shifts again.
The World Deserves Pad Thai
(In progress)