The Space Age of the 1960s brought about the beginning of NASA and United States space exploration. From there, we put a man on the moon, gathered data on the space station, and reached bounds never before reached by man. But in the couple of decades after the peak of NASA's relevance, things began to drop off. Problems for the agency really began with the 1986 Challenger explosions, which brought in a new era of precaution.

Then came 2001, when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas while re-entering the atmosphere. Not many years after, President Obama sidelined President Bush's 2005 Constellation Program, and thus we entered a cold era for NASA. No exploration, no real new advancements or feats achieved. Just sitting toiling in the vast emptiness of space.

Auguste Mayrat of The Federalist says years of space prowess has evaporated, especially in the wake of 'safetyism' that took over after the Challenger incident.

"All these missions NASA was planning eventually got scuttled, the organization became more bureaucratic...and no one really cared about space for decades," he says.

Of course, the safety measures in the wake of the Challenger incident were necessary. However, the damage was already done to the minds of people. They began fearing more exploration and it has led to the program sitting in a kind of purgatory.

But the problems run just beyond sitting on their hands and not doing much, despite having mountains of cash at their disposal. It seeps into the leadership, top to bottom.

"NASA itself is not a meritocracy anymore, which is a problem itself...you have that, with a lot of people not qualified to do their work in positions of authority...making decisions and they do not know what they are doing," says Mayrat. "You just have a lot of money being spent a no one knows what is happening.

The NASA budget for 2025 was around $25 billion, which was supposed to go toward things like the Artemis program to achieve another moon landing by 2030. But those missions have been delayed, the most recent coming in early February because of a hydrogen leak. The project is now five years past its launch date and still has yet to achieve anything.

So, how do we fix it? Well, it pretty much starts with a reconstitution of the organization itself.

"Maybe downsize NASA and work some of these contracts differently...because right now, there just seems to be a lot of corruption," Mayrat says.

President Trump has made space advancement a focus of his administration. Whether he will have time to achieve it or not, who knows. But if anything is going to get accomplished, NASA needs an overhaul to decompress the bureaucratic bloat it has accrued.

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