Prominent officials say NASA facilities are among the ‘worst’ they’ve ever seen

An independent panel of experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry and has a short-sighted road map for technology development.

“The problem with NASA is that it always seems to have $3 billion more in its programs than it has in its funds,” said Norm Augustine, chairman of the National Academies committee charged with examining the facilities, workforce and technology essential to achieving NASA’s long-term strategic goals. Augustine said a similar statement could sum up the two previous high-level reviews of NASA’s space programs that he chaired in 1990 and 2009. But the report released Tuesday describes NASA’s predicament in stark terms.

Complaining about collapsing infrastructure

About 83 percent of NASA’s facilities are beyond their expected lifespan, and the agency has a $3.3 billion maintenance backlog. Given NASA’s $250 million estimate for normal annual maintenance, it would take a $600 million increase in NASA’s annual budget for infrastructure repairs to catch up within the next 10 years.

For members of Congress or the White House, supporting a new NASA mission to the moon or a space telescope to probe the depths of the universe is often more attractive than investing in facility maintenance. Early initiatives generate headlines and create jobs. Most NASA facilities across the country are rated in “marginal or poor” condition, according to a presentation last year to the National Academies by Erik Weiser, NASA’s director of facilities and real estate.

“In NASA’s case, the tendency, not uncommon in a budget-constrained environment, to prioritize launching new missions over maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be considered acceptable by most industry standards,” the committee wrote in its report. “Indeed, during its inspection tours, the committee saw some of the worst facilities that many of its members have ever seen.”

“Since 2010, NASA’s mission budget has increased by 8 percent,” Augustine said. “Meanwhile, the mission support budget has decreased by 33 percent. If you do a little math, you’ll find that every dollar in the mission support budget today has to fund 50 percent more mission activities than it did in 2010, which was not that long ago.”

NASA must address these infrastructure deficits as the agency pursues the most challenging missions in its 66-year history.

“In terms of architectural complexity and technical complexity, NASA is facing challenges today – for example, with the Artemis program that is scheduled to land on the Moon in a few years – that far exceed anything that was faced in the Apollo program,” Augustine said.

All of NASA’s centers have facilities that the agency considers marginal, but Johnson Space Center in Houston has the lowest average rating. Johnson oversees astronaut training and is home to NASA’s mission control center for the International Space Station and future Artemis lunar missions. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which develops and operates many of NASA’s robotic interplanetary probes, and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, used for rocket engine testing, are the only centers that don’t have a poor infrastructure rating.

These assessments are about things like buildings and utilities, not the test benches or specific instruments inside them. “You can have a world-class microscope and materials lab, but if the building collapses, that microscope is not going to do you any good,” Weiser told the National Academies panel at a meeting last year.

The committee recommended that Congress direct NASA to create a revolving fund that is replenished annually to fund infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. Other government agencies use similar funds to support infrastructure. “This is something that will require federal legislation,” said Jill Dahlburg, a National Academies committee member and former director of the space science division at the Naval Research Laboratory.