Pictured above is NASA Ames Research Center, located in California.
Facilities
After the Space Shuttle Program ended, estimated costs for stations and facilities that need to be destroyed, refurbished, or preserved were included in future budgets. The costs however, are currently underfunded to due to budget cuts. The SSP has 654 facilities that were used for projects during the era of the program. NASA projects an estimated $5.7 billion to destroy, refurbish, and preserve these facilities. Additional costs include an estimated $12 billion to destroy, refurbish, or preserve equipment that resides within those facilities. In the projections for the next four years, the amount of money needed for the Construction of Facilities is $1.9 billion, with only $397.9 million for 2012. That amount is nowhere near enough to fund the retirement of the facilities. Developing a commercial enterprise provides a solution where the federal government can sell these facilities to private companies and have the companies spend the money to refurbish them. NASA will not have to account for the $17.7 billion in their budget plans and can still stay under budget. NASA and Boeing have negotiated a 15-year lease for Boeing to utilize the Orbiter Processing Facility in the Johnson’s Space Center. This lease allows Boeing “to exclusively occupy, use, and modify the Processing Facility and the Processing Control Center”. NASA has also partnered with Space Florida to “enable commercial space operations at Kennedy that will help NASA maintain facilities and assets while supporting our nation’s space objectives and expanding opportunities for the U.S. economy”.
Map of Major NASA Research Facilities
A problem that was caused when the Space Shuttle Program ended was that all of the facilities would become out of date, junk that now would become a waste of several billions of dollars. The solution is with commercial companies now developing their own technology NASA can either lease of sell the facilities so companies like SpaceX and Boeing can have facilities of their own to use without spending billions to create them. This is a win, win situation for both parties. Some of these facilities purpose though is not linked with the Space Shuttle Program and they are still on the fiscal budget each year and are accounted for in the budget.
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This is a page taken out of NASA's fiscal year budget analysis for 2012. The fiscal year ends in October of 2012 and this page shows the Facilities figures at the bottom. What is not included in the budget however, is the cost to destroy facilities that are no longer being used. These figures are in millions of dollars.
Environmental Clean Up
Once The Space Shuttle Program ended, the EPA placed many requirements on NASA for environmental clean up and proper disposal of all equipment, proper refurbishment of shuttles for public use, and limits on destruction of facilities. To meet EPA requirements, NASA has spent $51 million annually on environmental compliance cleanup. Remediation of the Space Shuttle Program sites represents “a substantial portion of total costs associated with transition and retirement of the Space Shuttle Program”. Projections for the Environmental Compliance and Restoration budget of NASA increase it’s funding to $90.4 million by 2016. NASA estimates that the “Space Shuttle Program has contributed to contamination at 94 of 163 sites and that the environmental clean up liability is about $1 billion over several decades”.
The most impact will be the modification of sites that will no longer be needed for the Space Shuttle Program. NASA believes that the ultimate impact will be moderate because they plan to conduct environmental and cultural resource analysis and if any properties are listed for the National Register of Historic Places then they will take no action to affect that type of property. Also with the leasing and selling of Space Shuttle Program sites to commercial companies, less action will need to be taken with fewer sites being destroyed or demolished. Most space shuttle property, however, had minimal impact of environmental resources and will not be a target for the EPA or NASA to cleanup.