I often highlight US military procurement boondoggles, because my former employer wasting endless billions on vaporware enrages me.
But did you know there's a qualitatively worse offender out there?
Let's talk about NASA's transition to an all-PowerPoint spaceflight program.
On February 1st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry after NASA engineering and management wrote off a high-energy debris strike to the left wing during launch (which actually destroyed the wing's leading edge) as harmless, in a repeat of the infamous "deviance normalization" process that had doomed Challenger in 1986. What this revealed was that NASA leadership was a clown show and had learned nothing from the earlier disaster. Rather than conducting a well-deserved purge, fixing the problems revealed, and continuing to fly a spacecraft that was synonymous with space exploration for my generation, however, the Bush Administration decided the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.
In early 2004, Bush released the Vision for Space Exploration. America was done tooling around in low orbit - we were going back to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Great. Awesome, in fact. NASA promptly put out contracts for commercial launch providers to service the still under-construction International Space Station and conceived a new plan for "Apollo on Steroids," built using systems perfected during the Shuttle era - the Constellation Program.
The Space Shuttle, which had flown hundreds of astronauts and done an immense amount of scientific and utility work on orbit, was fast-tracked into retirement with no replacement. In fact, for several years American astronauts would be entirely reliant on the Russians to get to the International Space Station the Shuttle had been instrumental in constructing. If Elon Musk and SpaceX hadn't coughed up Dragon and Falcon 9 as a stepping stone on his Martian vanity project, in all likelihood this would still be the case - his "old space" competition lacked the competence to build a working alternative as we found out recently with Boeing's Starliner fiasco.
I am, however, digressing. This is about NASA's flagship exploration programs. And one small problem quickly arose with the Constellation Program, namely that it was an engineering and programmatic fiasco. The rockets were poorly engineered and cost overruns quickly put the program into a death spiral of delays and continually escalating costs. In the end, $10B of inflation-adjusted dollars and five years of effort saw only one rocket actually launched - a boilerplate test vehicle for the "Crew Launch System," which was conceived as a cryogenic upper stage awkwardly stacked on top of a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster.
Obama convened a blue-ribbon panel in 2009 and shut the whole thing down. A totally demoralized NASA would spend the rest of the Obama Administration subcontracting the American space program to the Russians. In late 2017, the first Trump Administration directed them to actually get back into the business of manned spaceflight, and the Artemis Program was born - using a somewhat better-conceived Shuttle-derived launch vehicle than Constellation's bizarre scheme.
It's been eight years since. Has NASA been able to manage this program successfully and, perhaps, produce useful flying hardware for the first time in a generation? No. No, they have not. Some $60 billion (2025 dollars) in funding for the Space Launch System and the Orion moon-mission capsule has resulted in one (1) SLS launch that put an unmanned capsule into a free-return trajectory around the Moon. Somehow lacking funds despite this considerable outlay, NASA has resorted to subcontracting out everything possible, down to the lunar lander - leading to a bizarre scheme to use one of SpaceX's enormous Starship space cruisers as a lander like something out of Buck Rogers. Their new architecture was bloated to the point they couldn't run straightforward Apollo-style missions, leading to an equally bizarre plan to employ carefully curated and painfully slow halo orbits and a "Lunar Gateway" space station to stage missions to and from the lunar surface out of.
Of course this was a programmatic house of cards. Orion had teething problems. The SLS rocket was an insanely expensive white elephant requiring much of the Space Shuttle's infrastructure to be maintained at cost despite never launching. The lunar halo-orbit space station never seems to have gotten off the drawing board. Starship keeps finding new and interesting ways to crash and explode on Earth, let alone on the Moon. NASA, in short, comprehensively blew it.
The natural result of this programmatic failure was cancellation. And Trump's 2026 budget request raises the executioner's axe high above this benighted program - proposing to fund only two more SLS launches with no station, no lander, and ultimately no destination. As part of a 25% cut to NASA's overall budget, Trump is proposing merely to throw some more money at Mars projects that are safely 10+ years in the future.
Thus, we can expect very expensive PowerPoint slides out of NASA for the foreseeable future. In fact with the ISS slated for decommissioning in 2030 and rather poor relations with Russia and China (who do have manned space programs that they take quite seriously as well as plans to move forward with them), NASA may in fact transition to an all-PowerPoint agency after that date with no serious plans to fly humans into space at all going forward.
On February 1st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry after NASA engineering and management wrote off a high-energy debris strike to the left wing during launch (which actually destroyed the wing's leading edge) as harmless, in a repeat of the infamous "deviance normalization" process that had doomed Challenger in 1986. What this revealed was that NASA leadership was a clown show and had learned nothing from the earlier disaster. Rather than conducting a well-deserved purge, fixing the problems revealed, and continuing to fly a spacecraft that was synonymous with space exploration for my generation, however, the Bush Administration decided the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.
In early 2004, Bush released the Vision for Space Exploration. America was done tooling around in low orbit - we were going back to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Great. Awesome, in fact. NASA promptly put out contracts for commercial launch providers to service the still under-construction International Space Station and conceived a new plan for "Apollo on Steroids," built using systems perfected during the Shuttle era - the Constellation Program.
The Space Shuttle, which had flown hundreds of astronauts and done an immense amount of scientific and utility work on orbit, was fast-tracked into retirement with no replacement. In fact, for several years American astronauts would be entirely reliant on the Russians to get to the International Space Station the Shuttle had been instrumental in constructing. If Elon Musk and SpaceX hadn't coughed up Dragon and Falcon 9 as a stepping stone on his Martian vanity project, in all likelihood this would still be the case - his "old space" competition lacked the competence to build a working alternative as we found out recently with Boeing's Starliner fiasco.
I am, however, digressing. This is about NASA's flagship exploration programs. And one small problem quickly arose with the Constellation Program, namely that it was an engineering and programmatic fiasco. The rockets were poorly engineered and cost overruns quickly put the program into a death spiral of delays and continually escalating costs. In the end, $10B of inflation-adjusted dollars and five years of effort saw only one rocket actually launched - a boilerplate test vehicle for the "Crew Launch System," which was conceived as a cryogenic upper stage awkwardly stacked on top of a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster.
Obama convened a blue-ribbon panel in 2009 and shut the whole thing down. A totally demoralized NASA would spend the rest of the Obama Administration subcontracting the American space program to the Russians. In late 2017, the first Trump Administration directed them to actually get back into the business of manned spaceflight, and the Artemis Program was born - using a somewhat better-conceived Shuttle-derived launch vehicle than Constellation's bizarre scheme.
It's been eight years since. Has NASA been able to manage this program successfully and, perhaps, produce useful flying hardware for the first time in a generation? No. No, they have not. Some $60 billion (2025 dollars) in funding for the Space Launch System and the Orion moon-mission capsule has resulted in one (1) SLS launch that put an unmanned capsule into a free-return trajectory around the Moon. Somehow lacking funds despite this considerable outlay, NASA has resorted to subcontracting out everything possible, down to the lunar lander - leading to a bizarre scheme to use one of SpaceX's enormous Starship space cruisers as a lander like something out of Buck Rogers. Their new architecture was bloated to the point they couldn't run straightforward Apollo-style missions, leading to an equally bizarre plan to employ carefully curated and painfully slow halo orbits and a "Lunar Gateway" space station to stage missions to and from the lunar surface out of.
Of course this was a programmatic house of cards. Orion had teething problems. The SLS rocket was an insanely expensive white elephant requiring much of the Space Shuttle's infrastructure to be maintained at cost despite never launching. The lunar halo-orbit space station never seems to have gotten off the drawing board. Starship keeps finding new and interesting ways to crash and explode on Earth, let alone on the Moon. NASA, in short, comprehensively blew it.
The natural result of this programmatic failure was cancellation. And Trump's 2026 budget request raises the executioner's axe high above this benighted program - proposing to fund only two more SLS launches with no station, no lander, and ultimately no destination. As part of a 25% cut to NASA's overall budget, Trump is proposing merely to throw some more money at Mars projects that are safely 10+ years in the future.
Thus, we can expect very expensive PowerPoint slides out of NASA for the foreseeable future. In fact with the ISS slated for decommissioning in 2030 and rather poor relations with Russia and China (who do have manned space programs that they take quite seriously as well as plans to move forward with them), NASA may in fact transition to an all-PowerPoint agency after that date with no serious plans to fly humans into space at all going forward.
