Note:  The longer original article is online and was published by Kathleen M. Connell, December 31, 2007, on The Space Review.  This version is an updated summary. 
 
The National Air and Space Administration is at a crossroads. For all its visibility and iconic meaning to society, NASA does not yet have a deep and strongly-committed constituency base among the American population. It is unlike other well-known and well-funded government programs and agencies, such as the Veteran’s Administration, the Small Business Administration, Medicare, The Department of Education, or the Department of Defense. These and other federal entities regularly provide direct checks, subsidies, loans or services to individual Americans, their families and communities. These recipients are, in turn, political constituents of the elected Administration and Congress that decide the funding level of these agencies, including NASA.  It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that agencies that deliver “bread and butter” support and benefits to watchful constituents and enterprises, will usually be a higher budget priority for elected officials.

How then, will the public space sector investment grow sufficiently to meet its needs while competing with other domestic and foreign priorities, and several new emerging international competitors? More specifically, how can NASA, after retiring the Space Shuttle, presumably in 2010, build a new crewed spacecraft capable of supporting research on the International Space Station National Lab, lunar exploration and perhaps development, and provide seed grants to New Space firms as does the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program?  Just how can it maintain a portfolio of space science within its current budget wedge of less than 1%? The past 8 years have demonstrated that no NASA internal resources requirement, including the need for a new space access system, can drive the budget up to reach, let alone break, the 1% of GDP barrier. NASA cannot accomplish all of these responsibilities on a sustainable basis, and there is little long-term relief in sight, under the historical space policy status quo.

To resolve these questions and assist commercial New Space means growing the NASA slice of the budget pie - but how? From a structural perspective, a “perfect storm” of emerging new trends must converge as a “tipping point” in order to increase the civil space funding wedge. The brief analysis below explores three structural shifts now emerging simultaneously and how they could intersect to help create a consensus to provide more funds for innovative civil and commercial space initiatives.

Structural Shift #1:  From Localized Space Constituent to Global Space Consumer. The rise of the consumer, and consumer movements in America is well established in every market segment, but only recently can the notion of “space consumer” be thought about in relation to the space sector. With consumption comes choice. Space consumers may soon be “voting” with their discretionary income. Choices will soon abound for space services and goods, including personal spaceflight. Consumers are known to register stockholder initiatives (and protests). With consumer political clout they will be poised to apply pressure on firms via government regulation. And occasionally consumers use the power of the boycott to impact the marketplace.

Structural Shift #2:  The Rise of Proactive Citizen Space Hives.  A digital plank has been thrown across the distance that once separated the wiki community from the rocket community. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine captured this phenomenon in his notion of  “hives”, where independent agents spontaneously form to meet group objectives. Kelly viewed this trend as neo-biological social and economic development. Both led and leaderless hives of concerned parties are now mobilizing fast to make major impacts on space budgets and can provide highly competent input into the space policy process. Savvy activists and organizers are using tech tools, and more sophisticated advocacy IT platforms, to create communities that mobilize new publics, interest groups, and space “prosumers” (proactive consumer), beleaguered space scientists with dwindling budgets, and other space constituents. There is also a new hyper-connected niche of millions of digital space Web 2.0 conversationalists, who collectively have enormous reach and/or a “long tail” of impact.

Structural Shift #3:  The Crisis Factor: From Civil Space As A Luxury, To Space Assets as A Necessity in Global Warming Mitigation. Some in space circles have advanced a theory that the NASA budget is small because space is a luxury item compared to other budget priorities. As this essay argues, space budgeting choice is better understood in the context of structural constituencies in the political and policy world. Whatever truth there is to the luxury argument, global warming has moved civil and perhaps commercial space to a position of necessity in global warming observation, and possibly, mitigation. As such, space assets assume a new place of prominence in policy choice, with a new very large base of constituent-citizens who have something major at stake in space.