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Underfunded, Aging NASA May Be On Unsustainable Path, Report Warns

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The Apollo era, with its huge taxpaye...

That is the conclusion of a sweeping report, titled "NASA at a Crossroads," written by a committee of aerospace experts and published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. NASA's intense focus on current missions is understandable, considering the unforgiving nature of space operations, but "one tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing that will determine the success in the future," the report's lead author, Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chief executive, said Tuesday. But that may be hard to come by, in which case, he said, the agency needs to consider canceling or delaying costly missions to invest in more mundane but strategically important institutional needs, such as technology development and workforce training.

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