 Because NASA is clearly doing some really important work with its nearly
$18-billion annual budget.
Last week, just as Congress was finalizing the details of the so-called
“Cromnibus” bill, a $1-trillion spending plan to keep the federal government
running for the next year, a group of NASA interns released their latest work.
They didn’t help discover a new planet or help get satellites into orbit.
Instead, they used their taxpayer-funded jobs and taxpayer-funded equipment to
make a parody music video based on Meghan Trainor’s popular hit “All About That
Bass.”
See for yourself here.
YouTube
The “All About That Space” video was posted online a few days before Congress
voted to give NASA an $18 billion budget next year, a $360-million boost from
what they received this year. That’s also $500 million more than what the
agency’s own bosses requested when they met with congressional budget-makers in
March.
The logical conclusion: Members of Congress saw the parody video and said “yep,
they need more money because we want to see more of that.”
The video is supposed to help increase public awareness of NASA’s new Orion
project, which is the long-awaited replacement for the now-mothballed space
shuttle program. But does an $18 billion government agency that gets its funding
taken directly from taxpayers really need a PR strategy consisting of
intern-made music videos? Does public awareness matter to the success or failure
of the Orion project?
Gizmodo, which first reported on the “All About That Base” parody video, chalked
it up to “bored interns” that were the result of budget cuts at the agency.
Traditional logic would suggest that budget cuts force everyone to do more with
less, rather than leaving interns with absolutely nothing science-y to do at
all. But this is government, folks, where the traditional logic gets tossed out
the window.
Much like how there is no up or down in the vacuum of outer space, there seems
to relationship between funding and results at NASA.
The video brings to mind the Houston Chronicle’s recent conclusion that NASA is
“an agency adrift” in search of a new reason for existing in an age when private
companies are taking care of larger shares of America’s space work.
Waste at NASA sadly is not confined to cheesy music videos. The Washington Post
reported this week on how NASA spent $349 million to build a new launch tower in
Mississippi for a rocket program that was canceled before the tower was even
completed.
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 Now, the so-called A-3 test stand sits uselessly behind locked
gates at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County,
Mississippi, a huge monument to NASA’s place in the 21st century. As
the Post put it, the agency shows “what happens to a big bureaucracy
after its sense of mission starts to fade.” The useless project was
finished under orders from Congress.
But Congress still has faith in NASA, it seems.
The budget increase “will keep NASA in the forefront of innovation,
inspiring private companies to build new crew transportation and
fueling a new satellite servicing industry that can revive, refuel
and rejuvenate defunct communications satellites,” wrote members of
the Senate Appropriations Committee in a press release.
As part of the new spending plan, NASA has been instructed by
Congress to spend “no less than $100 billion” on a mission to land
probes on Europa, an icy chunk of rock orbiting Jupiter.
For comparison’s sake, the entire Apollo program of the 1960s and
early 1970s cost about $100 billion in today’s dollars just to visit
our own moon. Getting to a moon of Jupiter for the same price would
be quite an accomplishment.
But it’s likely that we’ll get more tangible results from NASA
first, like more hilarious space-themed music videos.
You can almost imagine children of the future telling their parents
that they want to grow up to be astronauts so they can make funny
videos on expensive government-funded computers.
Eric Boehm
Eric is a reporter for Watchdog.org and former bureau chief for
Pennsylvania Independent. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where
he enjoys great weather and low taxes while writing about state
governments, pensions, labor issues and economic/civil liberty.
Previously, he worked for more than three years in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, covering Pennsylvania state politics and occasionally
sneaking across the border to Delaware to buy six-packs of beer. He
has also lived (in order of desirability) in Brussels, Belgium,
Pennsburg, Pa., Fairfield, Conn., and Rochester, N.Y. His work has
appeared in Reason Magazine, National Review Online, The Freeman
Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Examiner and
elsewhere. He received a bachelor's degree from Fairfield University
in 2009, but he refuses to hang on his wall until his student loans
are fully paid off sometime in the mid-2020s. When he steps away
from the computer, he enjoys drinking craft beers in classy bars,
cheering for an eclectic mix of favorite sports teams (mostly based
in Philadelphia) and traveling to new places.
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
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