This began three decades of operations which sustained a massive, specialized workforce concentrated in Texas and Florida to service and maintain the complex spacecraft. The first Shuttle launch didn’t happen until nine years later, in 1981.
Notably, investing in the Shuttle also helped preserve aerospace jobs in California during the run-up to President Nixon’s re-election he later won the state. In 1972, the agency eked out Presidential approval to build a reusable space transportation system that would increase access to space and lower costs - the Space Shuttle. Having established the parochial nature of discretionary funding for NASA, it’s worth considering the historical context that led to the SLS.Īfter Apollo, NASA found itself with a declining budget and lacking political support for new projects. The end of the Space Shuttle during the Great Recession led to the SLS There are also literally thousands of subcontractors scattered around the country that receive funding from NASA projects, creating varying degrees of financial interest in their local representatives. Locales with large NASA contractors, like Lockheed Martin (Boulder, CO) and SpaceX (Hawthorne, CA), also tend to have congressional representation on strategic committees. Not coincidentally, nearly every lawmaker with a NASA center in their state or district serves on a congressional committee that sets policy or funding levels for the agency. There are just a handful of them, and they generally receive hundreds of millions to billions of dollars annually. NASA centers are distributed unevenly throughout the country. Every year Congress must pass this legislation, or the functions of the U.S.
not a legal obligation or defined by a prior law that guarantees annual expenditures). This spending is considered discretionary (i.e.
The Appropriations Committee writes annual legislation that funds common federal activities, from national defense to housing subsidies, art funding to scientific research. In addition, there are specific committees in Congress responsible for different oversight and funding of different parts of the government. Lawmakers operate under the theory that economically secure constituents will generally vote to sustain the status quo, which bodes well for their reelection chances. Government funding creates jobs, improves local economies, and sustains high-profile, unique projects that would otherwise not exist in such communities. Together, these create a strong parochial incentive to drive federal funds into specific geographical locales around the country. political system: annual congressional disbursement of “discretionary” funding and distinct regional districts of federal representation. The Space Launch System is a consequence of two characteristics of the U.S. Representative democracy incentivizes parochialism But there are real and durable reasons for why we have (and will continue to have) the SLS for many years to come. Depending on how you look at it, the SLS is either a product of a broken system that curries favor to wealthy industries or an example of representative democracy working as it should - with members of Congress responding to the local needs of their constituents. Given its cost, the existing launch capabilities provided by private companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and RocketLab, and the real progress being made on a new generation of super heavy-lift private rockets, why does the SLS still exist? The SLS is neither reusable nor cheap, costing between $876 million and $2 billion per launch, depending on how one accounts for its related overhead costs. Originally claimed to cost $6 billion and launch in 2016, the SLS will instead launch in 2022 after expenditures of more than $23 billion. However, SLS development has been undermined by serious cost overruns and schedule delays. At its first launch, it will be the most powerful rocket in the world. In both cases, Docker uses a userland (Linux process) TCP or UDP proxy.NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket has endured controversy since its creation in 2010.Ī product not of NASA’s leadership but of congressional legislation, the SLS will be the space agency’s first human-rated, heavy-lift launch vehicle since the Saturn V.
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