NASA Gets a $10 Billion Windfall From the 'Big Beautiful Bill'

NASA Gets a $10 Billion Windfall From the 'Big Beautiful Bill'

By Tosin Akintola of Reason. 

"The pork-barrel spending of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) doesn't just fund terrestrial programs like military spending and immigration enforcement, it also rockets taxpayer money to outer space. Under the bill, which the president signed into law on Friday, NASA will receive nearly $10 billion, $7.4 billion of which will be allocated to finance the agency's Moon to Mars program. 

The Moon to Mars program launched in November 2022 to establish humanity's presence "on and around the Moon before embarking on the first human missions to Mars" in the coming decades, according to NASA. To that end, the OBBBA allocates $700 million for the "procurement…of a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter," $2.6 billion for the Gateway lunar space station, and $4.1 billion for the Artemis IV and V missions, currently scheduled to launch in 2028 and 2029, respectively.

The prospect of a lunar colony and a Mars expedition may seem intriguing, but the OBBBA's funding for these objectives will likely lead to even more wasteful spending at NASA.

Since its launch in 2017, the Artemis program has completed just one mission: Artemis I, a 25-day unmanned lunar orbital flight in December 2022. Artemis II and III, which will actually carry humans to the moon, are scheduled for April 2026 and mid-2027, respectively. Though it's yet to transport anyone to space, the cost of the Artemis program is expected to reach $93 billion through FY 2025.

In July, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that three Artemis projects were responsible for nearly $7 billion in cost overruns since the agency began measuring the cost of NASA's major projects in 2009. This accounts for roughly half of all cost overruns across NASA's 53 current projects, according to the GAO.

The Gateway lunar space station, with a baseline cost estimate of $5.3 billion, is intended to be a "multi-purpose" outpost for moon-based missions, serving as a launch point for further explorations in space. Initially scheduled to launch in 2022, it's now expected to launch its first components in December 2027, according to a 2024 GAO report.

While the federal government has struggled to be efficient in its endeavors into space, the private sector has achieved remarkable success. SpaceX has completed several manned and unmanned missions faster and cheaper than NASA. A 2022 study comparing NASA and SpaceX missions showed that SpaceX's platform strategy is 10 times cheaper and twice as fast as NASA's traditional project approach. The same study found that SpaceX had an average cost overrun of 1.1 percent across its 16 missions. In NASA's 118 missions, the agency's average cost overrun was 90 percent. The success of their partnership landed SpaceX a key role in NASA's Artemis campaign, developing the agency's Starship Human Landing System.

With SpaceX's successes and a flood of private financing into the aeronautical industry—globally, private equity firms invested $8.6 billion in the sector in 2024—it's hard to see why the federal government still plays a leading role in space exploration. Rather than reducing the scope of government in space travel, the OBBBA shovels more taxpayer dollars into an agency that's been surpassed by its competitors in the private sector."

Sixty years after John Glenn orbited Earth, the private sector leads in space travel

See Who Built That Spaceship? by Andy Kessler. 

"The Mercury program cost $2.2 billion in current dollars, more than $300 million a launch. Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced last week that launches into orbit will cost $10 million within two or three years." 

"Let’s look at the numbers. In 2019 U.S. research and development spending was $656 billion—three quarters by business, the remaining $170 billion divided among the federal government, universities and nonprofits. Google spent $26 billion on R&D in 2019, Microsoft about $17 billion, Apple $16 billion, Intel $13 billion. I guess they did build that. For the record, federal money for research goes, in order, to the departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, and Defense, and then NASA.

A lot of that nonbusiness R&D spending is for basic research, as it should be. Where does basic research end and development begin? Alphabet, Google’s parent company, funds an experimental R&D group named X, which it describes as a “moonshot factory,” funding projects like self-driving cars, robots, internet-access balloons, geothermal energy, and advanced artificial intelligence. That’s a lot of basic research before product development. Unlike government projects, Google management can decide when to expand or kill projects based on their economic merit, not on how it affects a senator’s state. Universities can provide valuable basic research, as can government labs. But turning them into commercial products that scale to millions or billions isn’t a government trick."

"Stop with the “you didn’t build that.” Every entrepreneur knows he stands on the shoulders of giants. Even though government-run GPS satellites orbit the earth, do you think Chuck Schumer could write code to direct an Uber to your location?

Government might still be good at basic research, but certainly not at execution. Remember when the Food and Drug Administration required CD-ROMs sent by paper mail for the early Covid-test applications? Or how in 2020 New Jersey put out a call for Cobol programmers to upgrade ancient unemployment-benefits software? The private market’s accountability would never have permitted these errors."

Why Capitalists in Space Are Good for Americans’ Future

William Rinehart and Adam Thierer.

"Nothing quite exposes differing views on innovation than billionaires launching their own rockets into space. As Blue Origin ascended, carrying Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, critics rose up against private space tourism efforts. They repeated all the same slogans as the week before when Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson took a trip.

But the harshest critics have the story backwards. We are on the precipice of an epochal shift that will help make space travel cheaper, safer, and more accessible. Thanks to nearly two decades of reform at NASA, American entrepreneurialism and ingenuity are flourishing in space. The story is told as a failure, but it is actually a sign of success.

While many praised Bezos, Branson, and Elon Musk of SpaceX for using their fortunes to advance private space travel and exploration, with the goal of even getting to Mars, a vocal group of detractors blasted these capitalists for having the audacity to look toward the stars at all.

Discouraging private space exploration would be a step backwards and undo positive reforms that have made space more accessible and affordable. The way that NASA did things changed dramatically in 2005 when Mike Griffin took over as Administrator. In early 2006, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program was announced, which aimed to spend $500 million to develop and demonstrate commercial space launches. It was unlike anything NASA had tried before. Instead of detailed requirements which were typical at the time, COTS spent only three pages to lay out broad cargo and crew transportation capabilities. Private industry was left to innovate on their own to meet those requirements.

These contractual tweaks seem minor, but they’ve been revolutionary for NASA and for the space industry. COTS pushed SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin developing reusable rockets. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has since become a workhorse, supplying the International Space Station (ISS) and launching satellites into orbit. Another milestone was reached last year when Americans were launched to the ISS on a reused Falcon 9, the first time a U.S.-built space vehicle accomplished this feat since the shuttering of the Shuttle program.

COTS and its follow-on programs demonstrate what innovation can accomplish when coupled with policy reforms. About a decade ago, NASA ran the numbers on Falcon 9 and estimated its traditional system of contracting would have cost taxpayers $4 billion. SpaceX did it for $443 million, a tenth of the cost. NASA estimated that COTS’ successor, the Commercial Crew program, saved the agency some $20 billion to $30 billion over its lifetime, ultimately reducing the cost of launching hardware into space.

Cheap launches mean Starlink broadband internet is potentially feasible for rural regions. Cheap launches mean satellites like Sentinel 6 which track climate change are easier to deploy. They mean more experiments in space and a better understanding of our world. But yes, cheap launches also mean billionaires can hitch a ride to space, even if some mistakenly claim it’s just the rich living out their fantasies.

We have heard similar stories before. When the Wright Brothers proved flight was possible, some predicted it would never be anything more than a toy for the rich. Astronomer William H. Pickering argued that the vision of “gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic carrying innumerable passengers… would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could use his own yacht.”

Technologies of all stripes go through this process. The automobile was a novelty of the rich until it wasn’t. Cell phones were the plaything of the wealthy until they weren’t. Space travel seems poised to travel this same arc, and it was pushed along because NASA changed course and did things better.

Instead of dunking on billionaires, critics should take it as a chance to learn what has gone right and apply those lessons broadly. Smarter policy combined with American ingenuity is a recipe for success, both here on Earth and out in space."