This post grew out of a response to this comment :
In one of the interviews with the head of NASA I heard the idea that the flight to the moon was one of the consequences of the budget of 4 percent of GDP. And today's "sluggish" expansion to the Moon and Mars, including due to the cut budget. And if you raise it to at least one percent, everything would “turn around” much faster.
This is both true and not true. The flight to the moon in the sixties of the last century was one of the main political tasks for the United States, therefore the allocation of 4% of the state budget (not from GDP, but from the state budget, in developed capitalist countries these figures are very different) at that time was justified. The current official NASA lunar program, at the insistence of Congress , is also built on the same mobilization principles, and with the “maximum use of technologies proven in the Space Shuttle program and with the involvement of the same contractors... How outdated this approach is becomes evident, if only because even the ULA offered an alternative option with a partially reusable rocket designed for frequent launches. By 2016, this option turned into the now closed ULA Innovation program : CisLunar-1000 But then, in 2010-2011, the saying “sometimes the tail twists the dog” came true, as a result we see the SLS, not in vain called the Senate Lunch System.
Once again, NASA's current lunar program is an attempt to cross a hedgehog and a snake, an employment program and a lunar exploration program. Therefore, even a slight (from 0.5% to 1.0% of the state budget) increase in the NASA budget will not allow achieving much greater success than in the second half of the twentieth century.
I repeat, within the framework of the architecture based on the use of SLS, it is possible to make several short-term “visiting expeditions,” for the next stage - a permanently inhabited lunar base with a mobilization scheme for the exploration of the Moon, an increase in the budget of the lunar program will be required by about an order of magnitude. Naturally, no one will give such money in the absence of urgent need.
Commercialization of the space program in general, and the lunar / Martian programs in particular, under the public-private partnership scheme, will help achieve real success. Such a scheme has been successfully tested in the COTS commercial cargo delivery program , and is now applied in the CPLS commercial payload delivery program to the Moon . A few reasons:
- Unlike the classic cost-plus-profit mobilization scheme, contractors do not profit from performing each operation ordered by NASA separately, but only from successfully completed missions as a whole.
- While NASA is subsidizing the technology needed to carry out its plans, contractors bear the bulk of the costs.
- Having created the infrastructure, the contractors are interested in attracting third-party customers for its use, both private and government agencies in other countries (of course, in compliance with US legislation).
- Once signed with the contractor, NASA acts as the “anchor customer”, which dramatically increases investor interest in the project, making it easier for the contractor to find funding for its share of the cost.
- And, finally, the budget of the project specifically and of the space program in general ceases to be limited to a fraction of a percent of the state budget.
In general, this is a statement of my opinion on this matter. If you have any questions, I am ready to answer in the comments or in the supplement to the article. Thank youv1000 for a good question.