The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is at a transitional point in its history and is facing a set of circumstances that it has not faced in combination before. The agencys budget, although level-funded in constant-year dollars, is under considerable stress, servicing increasingly expensive missions and a large, aging infrastructure established at the height of the Apollo program. Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars, there is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASAs spectrum of mission areas. The lack of national consensus on NASAs most publicly visible mission, along with out-year budget uncertainty, has resulted in the lack of strategic focus necessary for national agencies operating in todays budgetary reality. As a result, NASAs distribution of resources may be out of sync with what it can achieve relative to what it has been asked to do.
NASA's Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus
2012
80 pages
Report
Keine Angabe
Englisch
NTIS | 2008
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