As Shuttle Program Ends, Final Price Tag Is Elusive

It's interesting that nowhere in this article is the money earned by NASA factored in. All the new inventions that are now bettering mankind that came about either as a direct result of NASA's technological research, or an offshoot of it.

The Wall Street Journal: As Shuttle Program Ends, Final Price Tag Is Elusive

Now that the space shuttle Atlantis has lifted off, NASA is closing the books on its 40-year shuttle program, prompting a final reckoning. One piece of the history is surprisingly elusive: the price tag.

Some media outlets have pegged the total cost of the shuttle program, and its 135 launches, at between $115 billion and nearly twice that amount, demonstrating the challenge of tallying a bill over such a long time span. Among the difficulties are properly accounting for inflation and imprecise budgeting in the program's early years. Furthermore, none of the figures include about $18 billion, in today's dollars, spent by the Defense Department on the shuttle program, by one estimate.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, first estimated the shuttle's cost to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the early 1990s. He was surprised to be assigned the project by his master's thesis adviser, Rad Byerly, who had just completed a stint as staff director of a House space and aeronautics subcommittee. "I said, 'Isn't this something you could snap your fingers and find out?' " Prof. Pielke recalls.

It turned out, though, to require "a lot of archival work and budget reconstruction." Prof. Pielke came up with a total of $83.7 billion through fiscal year 1993. Earlier this year, he and Dr. Byerly reported in Nature an updated total of $193 billion in 2010 dollars, including an estimate of this year's shuttle spending.

NASA prefers to count the spending differently, mainly by not adjusting for inflation. That yields a far smaller figure: $115.5 billion—which amounts to $860 million per launch, far more than the $7 million the agency projected in its early days, when it anticipated weekly launches. NASA didn't maintain shuttle-specific spending figures in the early years of the program, which accounts for Prof. Pielke's archival digging, but it has done so for the past quarter-century.

NASA spokesman Joshua Buck says the agency's method, without an inflation adjustment, is preferable because "that's really how much cash we spent."

Prof. Pielke and others who have studied the long-range costs of spending programs argue against such an approach. "In any long-term longitudinal survey of budgetary costs, I think it would be imprudent and misleading not to adjust for the effects of inflation," says Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of the journal Nonproliferation Review and director of a 1998 study by the left-leaning Brookings Institution on long-range nuclear-weapons spending in the U.S.

Adding to the confusion, NASA also has released an inflation-adjusted figure, despite its preference for a figure representing cash outlays. That number is even higher than Prof. Pielke's: about $211 billion.

The space shuttle isn't unique in presenting a nebulous price tag. Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the libertarian-oriented think tank Lexington Institute, says that the U.S. military doesn't have a standard way to adjust costs of long-term weapons programs for inflation.

Dr. Thompson recently wrote a Forbes.com article criticizing the Pentagon for its claim that F-35 Joint Strike Fighters would cost more than $1 trillion over their lifetime just for operating and support costs. He argued that the price tag was excessive, because in 2065, when the program is expected to end, that cost figure is expected to be a much smaller proportion of the economy than it would be today. In an interview, though, Dr. Thompson concedes that there is no easy answer: "One reason they report numbers this way is there is no better way to do it."

A spokeswoman for the Defense Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Beyond inflation, there are other wild cards with the space-shuttle cost estimates. As Prof. Pielke noted in his original report on space-shuttle costs at the behest of a journal reviewer, his calculations don't account for the opportunity costs of capital invested that otherwise might have been spent elsewhere, which often is included in estimates of private-sector spending but not government spending. His calculation doesn't include Defense Department spending on the shuttle, which by 1996 had totaled roughly $18 billion, in today's dollars, according to Mr. Schwartz. And it excludes some non-itemized NASA spending in the shuttle program's first two decades.

Prof. Pielke says he is encouraged that the latest estimates he and NASA have produced are both close to $200 billion, once NASA's figures are adjusted for inflation. "I'm not going to quibble about $10 billion more or less."