Waiting for Mr. Trump to solve the NASA streamlining problem

Some of NASA's facilities are considered inefficient and outdated, but plans to streamline NASA have faced many obstacles in Congress .

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a long history of fulfilling the American space ambitions. The agency has built 38 rocket test stands in 6 areas across the country, with construction and refurbishment costs reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. However, most of these test stands have not been operational for a long time.

In September, NASA’s inspector general said that only 10 test stands would be in use by 2026, partly due to the increasing number of private companies entering the spaceflight industry. The rocket test stand saga is just one of NASA’s long-standing problems, with facilities deteriorating but the agency not having enough money to properly maintain them, while the US Congress is reluctant to cut them because it wants to protect jobs, according to Forbes .

Donald Trump (right) and former US Vice President Mike Pence watch the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in May 2020.

Now, as US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House with a stance of cutting government spending, the plan to streamline NASA is expected to be realized. In addition, Mr. Trump's companion in the upcoming government is billionaire Elon Musk, founder of the space company SpaceX and will manage the Government Efficiency Oversight Committee.

Giant machine

Republican space policy insiders say the Trump administration may be able to tackle a difficult task: closing some of NASA's 10 major field centers, something that has been considered politically impossible for decades.

In the US, NASA has 5,000 buildings and structures worth a total of about $53 billion, covering more than 54,000 hectares across all 50 states, with most of the facilities concentrated in 10 field centers. The cost of maintaining all of these facilities is increasingly burdening NASA, as half of the facilities were built in the 1960s to serve the Apollo mission - taking astronauts to the moon.

NASA says 83% of its infrastructure is older than its projected lifespan. The cost of deferred maintenance has ballooned to more than $3.3 billion and is increasing by $250 million a year.

Mr. Casey Dreier, of the Planetary Society (USA), a non-profit organization specializing in space policy research, said that NASA's spread across the US was a deliberate strategy of former NASA Administrator James Webb to maximize political support for the agency, according to Forbes . NASA's 10 field centers previously operated independently and tended to compete with each other to attract jobs, thus leading to cases of overlapping systems between locations.

Among the field facilities are Glenn Center (Ohio), Ames Center (North Carolina) and Langley Center (Virginia), all of which predate 1945 and are under consideration for merger. In addition, Stennis Center (Mississippi) has many unused rocket test stands. The workforce at the four facilities includes about 15,000 civil servants and seasonal workers. As of 2023, NASA will have more than 19,700 civil servants and about 50,000 seasonal workers.

NASA lacks the funding to maintain the massive facility, and efforts to downsize have often been blocked by Congress, which tends to protect jobs in their districts. The cuts have been relatively small over the years. Since 2010, NASA has only given up about 64 hectares of land in divestment plans.

NASA spokeswoman Jennifer Dooren said the agency is on a strategic path that includes divestment over the next 20 years as it addresses "challenges posed by significant shortfalls in its maintenance and construction budget."

Mr. Donald Trump speaks at NASA facility in Florida state in May 2020

What can Trump do?

Experts say that to overcome congressional opposition, Mr. Trump may need to push hard for a proposal similar to the one applied to the military, which is to establish a bipartisan commission like the Base Restructuring and Closure Commission - created by Congress to coordinate the closure of five U.S. military bases between 1988 and 2005. However, NASA's case will be difficult to compare with the military, which is much larger in scale and can compensate.

In the short term, the Trump administration could consider cutting NASA's budget, with the creation of the Oversight of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Commission, headed by Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamey, to examine which parts of the government's budget are inefficient. Trump has also appointed billionaire Jared Isaacman, a close friend of Musk, to head NASA for the next term.

In addition, space industry experts predict that Mr. Trump will push NASA and the US Department of Defense to sign more contracts with private companies outside, instead of using their own capital to maintain capacity. One example given is eliminating NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which costs $4 billion per launch, and replacing it with SpaceX's Starship rocket. However, once again, employment issues, such as for employees developing SLS, will become an obstacle for lawmakers to pass.

“Everyone acknowledges NASA doesn’t need 10 field centers,” a former Trump staffer who worked for NASA during the transition in 2016 told Forbes . “The question is how tough is the president going to be.”

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/cho-ong-trump-giai-bai-toan-tinh-gon-nasa-185241211103348713.htm