Someday flowers will grow there, but first you've got to go there; Oh, you will go to the moon!

There is a surprising amount of debate amongst astronomers and related scientists about which aspects of NASA's mission we actually support. Roughly speaking, there is broad agreement that NASA does a huge public good in supporting the science it does. I'll admit, we are not impartial observers here, but rather those whose living is paid for by said scientific funding. On the other hand, I am not sure if anyone hates the International Space Station as much as astronomers. We tend to consider it a huge waste of time just waiting to spring a leak and become an even greater waste of money. I'll let the following article from the Guardian make the case:

Today, the cost of the ISS has risen to $100bn and counting. It sucks almost $2bn from Nasa's budget every year, essentially to stay mothballed in low Earth orbit. No one expects it to be finished before 2017 and, even then, it will be a mere shell of the plans on the drawing board.

"You're not going to see the space station in the pretty pictures, there will be pieces missing," says Dr Keith Cowing, a former Nasa scientist and editor of the Nasa Watch website. "There won't be as many flights, it won't be resupplied as often. Nasa is either unwilling or incapable of telling anybody with a straight face what the space station will look like."

For comparison, the Hubble Space telescope cost about $2 billion to build, after we include the substantial cost overruns, and has run a few billion more to stay operational, while producing vastly more science than the Space Station ever will. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has a comparable price tag.

The big issue for the coming years, though, is the proposed mission to the moon and eventually Mars. Some astronomers are in favor of this idea. The leading voice I've found on the web is the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. He's actually a very nice guy and a very good astronomer, not to mention one of the most amusing and sarcastic guys I've ever met at a meeting (he spoke at last year's NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows' Symposium); the name of his website refers to correcting the bad astronomy found in movies and on tv. He argues in favor of the lunar component of the mission, based on a need for the exploration component of NASA's mission, but notes the inherent problems facing NASA at the moment:

This brings up two critical points:

1. Money. Where will NASA fund this? As it stands, Bush gave NASA an unfunded mandate to go to the Moon and Mars. NASA bit into this wholesale, saying it could be done. And sure enough, it can, if you’re willing to sacrifice a major chunk of astronomical science. NASA has been doing just that, cancelling many missions and delaying others. This cannot stand. The only option is to increase NASA’s budget and make sure there is oversight that the money isn’t thrown down a black hole (so to speak). NASA’s budget is tiny, and this money can be found.

2. Public outreach. When Gordon says "more specifics" I think he means that NASA needs to be more upfront on costs (they specifically avoided talking about how much a Moon base would cost in a recent press conference), but I think this could also be interpreted as simply having NASA make some sort of case for going to the Moon.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated over the NASA administration’s weak attempts at getting the public behind them on this. After years of work making plans on a new rocket to get us to the Moon, a new lander, and all that, they had and still have precious few actual webpages about why they’re doing this.

I completely agree with his first point, but I'm not sold that the second one is really the proper focus. NASA's budget is indeed small compared to the overall government budget, but this is true for most scientific research, and there is no guarantee that a budget increase is coming any time soon, especially given the current administration's complete inability to manage the federal budget. Even if NASA does get an increase, it is liable to be on the chopping block the next time the government faces a pinch. For the meanwhile, I think we have to assume that science funding will be competing against more practical engineering missions until it is proven otherwise. As to public relations, sending people into space really does sell itself. All kids love NASA and space shuttles, and always will. The public just doesn't view it as pork, even when it is.

Matt Yglesias had something to say on this topic as well today (as did I and a bunch of others in the comments). He sees private space exploration as advantageous over government-run version:

I'm not one of these "open outer space to more private-sector activity and we'll have colonies on Titan in seven weeks" people but it does seem to me that there's probably a sufficient mix of legitimate commercial uses for space and rich eccentric space enthusiasts (and, of course, there's the intersection of the two: providing space-related commercial services to wealthy eccentrics) to keep human activity going out there without giant subsidies to the aerospace industry.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. NASA has a long history of letting aerospace contractors run huge cost overruns on everything they build. Not all of this money is "wasted" per se; it pays salaries and gets reinvested in the economy in part. Still, it's just not an efficient use of money most of the time especially compared to science funding. At the moment, we want to go to the moon because it will help us to get to Mars, and getting to Mars will help us to have gotten to Mars. The deadline is over a decade away and liable to change, meaning that money spent on designs will be followed by money spent on redesigns, and then re-redesigns, all while our goals keep changing. The current administration has an unhealthy liking for military domination of space (I'm not kidding, Rumsfeld intended to have celestial military preparedness!), but hopefully this will change in the future. if they really wish, they can always fight unnecessary wars in order to fund the aerospace companies, but they need to spend the NASA budget more wisely. Men were sent into space by private companies in order to win the $10 million Ansari X-prize (that's 1/10,000th the price of the space station), and it took no more than a few years to accomplish the feat. By scaling up the prize money and the goals, we have the potential for further breakthroughs in either manned or unmanned exploration at a fraction of the cost (and no overruns, since it's a prize). As crass as it may sound, there are numerous money making opportunities for companies that successfully develop space-based technologies (who wouldn't buy a moonrock?), and the financial incentive exists to motivate the field at the moment, using technology vastly more modern than the 20-year old shuttles and space station (think of 20-year old computers, and it explains a lot about their problems). This allows NASA to free up their money for scientific missions, like space-based observatories (NSF covers ground based ones, typically), as well as the robotic technologies we'll need to take the lead any place we'll eventually want to send people. Remember, at first you can only send a couple of people anywhere out in space, and they're not going to be able to build any kind of substantial structure themselves.

I know this may slow down the progress of manned space exploration in the short run, but it does account for the fact that the government can basically screw up anything it gets its hands on. In the long run, private industry works faster than the government, especially when you can make it compete with itself. It will undercut US hegemony, but that is a feature, not a bug. Simply put, the current state of NASA, having its resources increasingly drained away in order to make good on a throwaway line from a three-year old state of the union address, is untenable, and it's time to admit failure and find a new path for the future. This lesson, needless to say, can be generalized for other policy fiascoes...