NASA’s biggest problem and how to solve it.

NASA’s biggest problem is not putting humans on the moon, exploring Mars, or entering deep space. They already have done those things.

Their biggest problem could be solved by the touch of a computer key. But so far, it has proved intractable.

The problem is dollars, which the U.S. government pretends doesn’t have the legal and physical ability to create in infinite amounts.

Below, you will read excerpts from an article that appeared in the January 2024 issue of Scientific American Magazine.

As you read this post, keep in mind three facts:

1. The U.S. federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, never can run short of U.S. dollars. It has the infinite ability to pay any invoices denominated in dollars.

(Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.

“There is nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody.

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print the money to do that.”)

Unlike state/local governments, the federal government does not spend tax dollars. It destroys all the tax dollars it receives and creates new dollars, ad hoc when it spends. Even if the federal government collected $0 in taxes, it could continue spending forever.

2. NASA employs some of the most outstanding scientists and mathematicians the world ever has known.

NASA’s math and predictions differ markedly from economist’s math and predictions. NASA must focus on exactitude. A one percent or half a degree difference can mean a trajectory misses by millions of miles or a rocket explodes.

By contrast, economics is filled with estimates, approximations, unproven beliefs, and unrealized projections. No one can be confident in predictions about next year, next month, or even tomorrow.

So economists feel comfortable with missed estimations, and in fact, if any economist, by blind luck, happens to predict next year’s ending S&P score, he will be hailed as a genius, at least in his own mind.

For that reason:

3. Economists have a rare ability to ignore facts in favor of reputation. So, when someone of repute claims that “A” causes “Z,” he/she will be widely believed within the community and worldwide, even when facts disagree.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have guessed that I am talking about the easily and often debunked notion that federal taxes fund federal spending, aka “The Big Lie” in economics.

No NASA mathematician could get away with being so wildly wrong.

And now for excerpts from the Scientific American article:

Here’s How to Bring Mars Down to Earth: Let NASA Do What NASA Does Best
Increasing NASA’s budget would ease pressure and allow it to dream even bigger

BY PHIL PLAIT

NASA has a planet-sized problem on its hands.

Ironically, its source is here on Earth: Congress, which has the penny-wise but pound-foolish policy of releasing just a trickle of funding to the space agency every year, hobbles many of NASA’s mission goals that require thinking past a two-year House or six-year Senate term.

This hurdle has repercussions that can be felt across the solar system.

On Mars, the Perseverance rover collects small samples inside the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater, which held a vast lake billions of years ago. Scientists consider it one of the best places to scout for evidence of ancient life on Mars or at least to see whether conditions were ripe for its genesis.

These Martian souvenirs safely rest inside hermetically sealed cylinders stored onboard the rover or dropped strategically on the planet’s surface. A future Mars-bound mission will pick them up and bring them to Earth for study.

The problem? That later mission currently does not exist—and it’s unclear when it will.

Suppose you are among those who believe that space exploration is a waste of time and money and that NASA already spends dollars better used for cutting taxes and preventing immigration. In that case, you might as well stop reading now and instead turn to your local sports section or Fox News.

But if you believe space exploration aids the survival of the human species (see here), there is a solution to NASA’s money woes.

Yes, the obvious solution is for the federal government, which has infinite money, to allocate more of that money to NASA. But the real problem is getting Congress and the President to vote for it.

We’ll discuss that solution in this post, but first, a bit more about NASA’s finances.

Last September, an independent review board investigated the current state of a Mars sample return (MSR) mission and found that NASA could meet a 2030 deadline but for $10 billion, making it among the most expensive science projects NASA has ever undertaken.

The National Research Council’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey for 2013–2022, created by a panel of dozens of leading scientists, stated that an MSR was a “highest-priority flagship mission” for that decade.

A 2008 NASA preliminary planning document reported that half of 55 critical investigations into Mars would be addressed by an MSR. Looking into the idea of life on Mars, whether ancient or extant, is clearly an essential scientific goal for NASA with potentially immense significance for humanity.

Where does this leave things? The MSR could be canceled, but that is clearly the worst possible option. Given the mission’s scientific importance—and all the time and money already invested, as well as the efforts undertaken by Perseverance—this idea shouldn’t be considered seriously.

So here’s my radical thought: Fund it. Fully. Give NASA what it needs to make this mission work, including a wide enough margin for technical safety considering the problematic nature of the engineering and management required.

By “fund it,” I don’t mean taking needed money away from other deserving endeavors, as has happened when other NASA missions have run over budget. And I don’t think it should become a separate line item in NASA’s budget, as the James Webb Space Telescope did when its costs bloated. That approach might suffice for this particular case, but it is not a long-term solution for NASA’s predicament.

This increase would also fix many of the management problems pointed out in the 2023 MSR report, allowing NASA to hire more technical and administrative staff.

This funding shouldn’t be controversial, but NASA’s finances are hugely exaggerated in public perception compared with the actual budget.

According to one poll, in 2018, the average American thought NASA received more than 6 percent of federal spending when it only gets 0.5 percent. 

From a strictly economic point of view, NASA returns far more money than it is given. The agency estimated that it generated an economic output of $71.2 billion in 2021; that puts its return on investment at around $3 for every $1 going in. 

Let me interject that the percentage of return on investment is meaningless for a Monetarily Sovereign entity like the U.S. federal government.

Think about this very carefully: If you have infinite money, why would you be concerned about the return on investment percentage? The U.S. federal government has endless dollars. Even a .0000001% return on your investment puts you ahead of the game.

The point is that routine business considerations do not apply to a Monetarily Sovereign government. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said, “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

Creating money costs the government nothing, so any return is a plus.

Increasing NASA’s resources should be a no-brainer. Instead, Congress has tended to target NASA whenever a budgetary ax is wielded.

This makes zero sense, given how small a portion the agency gets. Cutting NASA’s funding is like making room on your computer’s hard drive by deleting tiny text files while ignoring the gigabytes of movies you’ve already watched.

Worse, cutting NASA’s funding is like deleting tiny text files when your computer’s hard drive already has infinite spare room.

Please note that I’m talking about what we ought to do. That may be a stretch with a Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives that in 2023 proposed bludgeoning NASA with a 22 percent cut that would kill the MSR, end moon landings, and lead to 4,000 layoffs. Perhaps if the public were more vocal, Congress might listen. Might.

A monkey wrench in all these works is the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, intended to thwart debt default by the federal government.

There is the Big Lie in action. The Monetarily Sovereign federal government cannot default unless Congress wants it to default. The Fiscal “Responsibility” Act does nothing to prevent a default that only Congress can initiate.

Part of the fallout from this act, which became law last June, is a cap on NASA’s budget until 2025. This cap has had an impact already: NASA officials are considering cuts to the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, two of the space agency’s workhorses.

Increasing the budget for an MSR is essentially impossible as long as this act is in effect, and the uncertainty about funding makes it difficult for NASA to know exactly how to move forward on any new designs.

If the MSR and NASA can weather these setbacks for the next two or three years, there may be a path forward. Despite all this havoc, the argument for increasing NASA’s overall budget still stands.

Boosting it by, say, 20 percent to $30 billion a year would ease a vast amount of pressure the agency finds itself under when proposing and building new missions. Even doubling its funding would hardly dent national spending, and the payoff would be tremendous.

This isn’t to say that everything NASA does is cost-effective; for instance, I have been vocal about the enormously bloated and decreasingly useful Space Launch System rocket. But that project’s delays and overruns can be traced to congressional meddling.

With less pork-barrel legislation and better management, NASA could deliver on its promise of bringing the universe to Earth.

The author, Phil Plait, embraces the Big Lie when he derides “pork-barrel” legislation, meaning spending money on politically demanded but economically useless projects.

He and all the budget worriers don’t acknowledge that even the most apparent pork barrel projects cost the federal government and taxpayers nothing but are beneficial to the economy. They put dollars into the pockets of American workers.

NASA benefits the economy by creating jobs, jumpstarting businesses, and growing the economy. Through all NASA activities, the agency generated over $64.3 billion in total economic output during fiscal year 2019 and supported more than 312,000 jobs nationwide. NASA-developed technologies benefit society in health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, environmental and agricultural resources, computer technology, and industrial productivity.

THE SOLUTION

Earlier, we said, “The obvious solution is for the federal government, which has infinite money, to allocate more to NASA. But the real problem is getting Congress and the President to vote for it.

Often, you must solve a problem by solving earlier problems.

Let’s say the problem is getting water. You need to dig a well. For that, you need a shovel. For that, you need a blade. For that, you need metal. For that, you need fire.

In the immediate case, the problem is getting Congress and the President to vote for more NASA funding. You need the politicians to accept that the federal government has infinite money.

For that, you need the voters to accept that fact. For that, you need an influential leader to understand The Big Lie and to promulgate the truth.

NASA’s solution would be to work with some MMT (Modern Monetary Theory), and Monetary Sovereignty people who can help make the facts public — people like Stephanie Kelton, Warren Mosler, John Harvey, and many others (yes, including me.)

NASA has good relationships with Congress and the public. It has used those “ins” to foster the scientific benefits NASA creates, but NASA hasn’t tried to show the “money-really-is-no-object” financial facts to the public.

In short, most people agree with NASA’s scientific goals but wonder where the money will come from.

Given NASA’s loud megaphone, MMT economists could broadcast the facts across the nation.

One simple solution cannot often be the basis for solving many problems. Still, federal funding is that solution, and help from economists who understand Monetary Sovereignty is the path to the solution.

The combination of NASAs influence and reputation plus intelligent, knowledgeable economists could deliver the money NASA so urgently needs.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

……………………………………………………………………..

The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY