10 things NASA should do to justify its continued existence

NASA has been coping (badly) with an identity crisis since the end of the Apollo Project in the 1970s. The country really didn’t know what it was for, other than spectacle. It drifted as political fates beyond its control set its agenda, which regularly changed in ways that wasted money and work. For decades, it told itself at least it was the only way for the United States to do useful basic research in space; both via robotics and with crewed spaceflight. But finally the emergence of successful private interests in spaceflight have ended that monopoly.

The United States doesn’t need NASA to fly astronauts to space. And it doesn’t need NASA to design and build rockets. And the International Space Station has no viable reason to exist other than learning how to operate large structures in space and how humans can exist in space for long durations; both of which it has now provided. The robotic probes that go to distant worlds or take pictures of far away stars carry the NASA logo but they are designed, built, and operated by organizations with at best loose ties to NASA other than budgets.

In the next 20 years NASA is going to evolve or die. To avoid dying it needs to have a clear mission. I argue that mission should be to build the infrastructure the world will need as it begins to become a multiplanetary species…