Congress has resisted efforts to cut or consolidate the sprawling agency’s storied launch and research centers for decades. Now crumbling infrastructure, mounting costs and budget cuts may force the issue.
By Jeremy Bogaisky, Forbes Staff
Over the years, as NASA developed the rockets that put Americans on the moon and then the Space Shuttle, it amassed a collection of 38 rocket engine test stands at six sites across the country. Many of them are massive structures, as tall as a football field stood on its end, that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build or refurbish. Now most sit silent. Only 10 of the test stands are expected to be in use by 2026, NASA’s inspector general reported in September, primarily due to the shift in rocket development to private space companies like SpaceX.
The test stands are a microcosm of the problems NASA has been struggling with for decades: a sprawling array of aging facilities and systems that it doesn’t have the money to properly maintain, but which Congress resists pruning to protect jobs.
Now Donald Trump is returning to the White House on an avowed mission to slash government spending, with the help of billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Republican space policy insiders say the Trump administration could have what it takes to face down a challenge that’s proved politically impossible over the past few decades: closing some of NASA’s 10 major field centers.
“There are structures in NASA that are overlapping and really non-functional at the present time that need to be examined for either total elimination or big changes,” said former Republican House science and space committee chair Bob Walker, who since his retirement from Congress in 1997 has consulted for space companies and was involved in formulating the first Trump administration’s space policies.
“There is a lot of belief that there are as many as four centers that need to be examined for a potential consolidation,” he said.
“Everybody acknowledges NASA doesn’t need 10 centers,” said a member of Trump’s NASA transition team in 2016 who spoke with Forbes on the condition of anonymity to speak freely. “The question is how aggressive does the president want to be?”
NASA Nationwide
NASA has built up an agglomeration of more than 5,000 buildings and structures worth $53 billion spread across 134,000 acres in all 50 states. The expense of maintaining it all has become an increasing burden as the agency has aged. Roughly half of NASA’s infrastructure was built in the 1960s for the Apollo program, which first landed astronauts on the moon, while another third is even older. NASA says 83% of its physical infrastructure has aged beyond its expected lifespan. Its backlog of deferred maintenance has ballooned to more than $3.3 billion and is increasing more than $250 million per year based on annual budget gaps.
“NASA has an extremely large footprint for being a modestly sized federal agency,” said Casey Dreier, head of space policy for the nonprofit Planetary Society. The broad geographic distribution was an intentional strategy of the second NASA administrator, James Webb, to maximize political support for the agency – and which also makes it hard to pare back, Dreier said. “It’s a feature, not a bug of our system.”
Most NASA facilities are concentrated in 10 centers, many of which have storied roles in the U.S. space program, like mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston and the launchpads at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The centers have historically operated with a great degree of independence, competing with each other to obtain work. That led them to develop duplicative capabilities: A 2013 NASA inspector general report on underused facilities counted 36 wind tunnels at five centers and 40 large thermal vacuum chambers at seven locations.
Chief on the target list for closure or consolidation over the years have been Glenn Research Center in Ohio, Ames Research Center in Northern California and Langley Research Center in Virginia – all of which are older facilities that date back to before 1945 – as well as Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the home of many of NASA’s underused rocket engine test stands. Between them they employ roughly 15,000 civil servants and contractors. NASA overall had roughly 19,700 civil servants on its payroll as of the end of 2023, plus about 50,000 contractors.
NASA is increasingly hampered in achieving its objectives by the cost of upkeep for its aging, chronically underfunded facilities and technologies, according to a study from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences released this year. For example, the majority of the field centers’ laboratories “are cramped, 1960s-era facilities that impede science, are expensive to maintain, and discourage hiring world-class talent,” the report said.
But efforts to downsize the agency’s facilities have been repeatedly stymied over the past 30 years by members of Congress intent on protecting jobs in their districts. “It’s politically impossible for an agency head even to consider closing a major facility,” Mike Griffin, who headed NASA from 2005 to 2009, told SpaceNews in 2013. “It just can’t be done, because the Congress will not allow it.”
A 2005 internal NASA study following the end of the Space Shuttle program recommended closing Glenn, moving programs from Ames and closing or consolidating Stennis. None of that happened. Instead, NASA just closed California’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory, one of three smaller facilities the report also said had insufficient work to justify continued operations. Almost 20 years later, the other two are still operational.
Since 2010, the agency has only divested 160 acres of real estate, according to a November inspector general report.
NASA is following a “strategic roadmap” that includes divestments over the next 20 years as it works through “the challenges posed by a significantly underfunded maintenance and construction budget,” NASA spokesperson Jennifer Dooren wrote by email in response to questions from Forbes.
A Military Model
What’s needed to overcome parochial political opposition to job losses, the Trump NASA transition official told Forbes, is for the president-elect to put muscle behind an idea that’s been proposed periodically for decades: to establish a bipartisan committee modeled on the Base Realignment and Closure commissions that Congress set up to orchestrate five rounds of military base closures from 1988 to 2005.
“That’ll take many years,” he said. “It has to be seen as a bipartisan solution that’s good for the nation.”
But Dreier said the smaller size of NASA compared to the military will make it more difficult. There aren’t “hundreds of options to close down and horse trade around. These are going to be very strongly defended.”
In the shorter term, the Trump administration is likely to look for ways to cut costs at NASA as part of a broader effort to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending. Trump has tasked Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamey to lead the way through an advisory group dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Space industry experts expect the Trump administration to push for NASA and the Defense Department to contract out more to private space companies rather than maintain their own capabilities. One of the biggest potential cost-saving moves at NASA would also benefit Musk and SpaceX: scrapping the costly Space Launch System, a government-owned rocket that costs $4 billion per launch that is the main vehicle of the Artemis program, which aims to return American astronauts to the moon. It could potentially be replaced by SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
But members of Congress are likely to fight to protect both SLS jobs in their districts as well as support keeping NASA centers open.
Apart from California, most of NASA’s facilities are concentrated in red states, complicating closing them for a Republican administration. And for all the emphasis on efficiency that the incoming Trump administration is proclaiming, the political costs of downsizing also should be weighed for what it could mean for congressional funding for space programs, said Dreier.
“Is it worth losing support from the Mississippi contingent or Ohio forever?”
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