NASA doesn’t have nearly the infrastructure to obligate double its existing budget. It’d take 6 months just to figure out how to spend it, and a lot of it would go to anybody that said they could use it instead of to valuable projects. I would support doubling the NASA budget over say 3 years - that’d give the agency time to hire up and develop the pipeline of work.
There are some immediate smaller problems that could eat some quick money, like funding Mars Sample Return, uncancelling Janus, some one-off funding for an ISS deorbit tug and commercial stations, and probably untold amounts of facility maintenance.
But yeah, an immediate doubling without warning doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.
NASA doesn’t have nearly the infrastructure to obligate double its existing budget. It’d take 6 months just to figure out how to spend it, and a lot of it would go to anybody that said they could use it instead of to valuable projects. I would support doubling the NASA budget over say 3 years - that’d give the agency time to hire up and develop the pipeline of work.
There are some immediate smaller problems that could eat some quick money, like funding Mars Sample Return, uncancelling Janus, some one-off funding for an ISS deorbit tug and commercial stations, and probably untold amounts of facility maintenance.
But yeah, an immediate doubling without warning doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.