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THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION COST MORE THAN THE ROCKET THAT LAUNCHED THAT SAME EVENING

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Every four years, the United States inaugurates a President. Whether incumbent or newcomer, and regardless of party, these events can cost quite a bit of money–including a great deal that comes from taxpayers. Federal funds go largely to cover security, transportation, and clean-up after the event, while private donations cover the lavish balls and banquets that come after the swearing-in ceremony itself.

Numbers from the 2017 Inauguration are not yet published, but this most recent Inauguration was widely expected to cost as much as $175 or even $200 million. Of that amount, it is broadly expected that approximately $60 million would be funded via donations, with the remaining ~$140 million or more coming from federal funds. 

These figure would be more or less in keeping with past expenditures. Dating back to President Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981, the inflation-adjusted private expenditures for newly elected Presidents have all come in between approximately $55 and $60 million; while public expenditures in 2005 and 2009 were an inflation adjusted $146 million and $138 million.

What would 140 million taxpayer dollars buy if they were spent on space? Well, for starters, it would have paid for the rocket that launched the same day as the 2017 Inauguration.

About eight hours after the swearing in, an Atlas V rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 41 Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, carrying a national security satellite. The Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite was the third of its type to be launched to geosynchronous orbit. Along with the others in the constellation, SBIRS GEO-3 will be used to continuously monitor the Earth for missile launches, as well as providing situational awareness to US soldiers, firefighters, and disaster responders. The 10,000 pound satellite itself cost over a billion dollars, but the launch, which was conducted on the 401 variant of the Atlas V, came in at approximately $100 million.

The next SBIRS GEO satellite–which will complete the initial SBIRS GEO constellation–is slated for launch later this year on the slightly more powerful and slightly more expensive Atlas V 411 configuration.

We’ll revisit the numbers from 2017 once they are published by the Federal Election Commission, and will make a corrections post as well as updating this post should if they prove significantly off-base. 


Sources: 

Private expenditures on Inauguration data comes from FEC filings. Public expenditures can be gleaned from Maryland, Virginia, and District of Columbia budget filings (the states and the District are reimbursed by the Federal Government) as well as Congressional records. More conveniently, summary data have been broadly published by newspapers such as the Washington Post without dispute.

US Inflation is always calculated using the Consumer Price Index-driven Inflation Calculator provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Obtaining precise information about the cost of the SBIRS launch is essentially impossible, as the SBIRS GEO-3 launch and the upcoming -4 launch were part of earlier block buys. However, past comments from United Launch Alliance officials have indicated that current pricing for the Atlas V 401 is “under $100 million.” Using the nifty ‘Rocket Builder’ online pricing tool provided by ULA, you can see that the off-the-shelf price of the Atlas V 401 is approximately $109 million. 

Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy, via the Obama White House account on Flickr. 

space exploration inauguration potus
Greetings, new readers! My thanks go out to author Joseph Stromberg at Vox, who wrote a great piece posted today with the title “7 surprising things the government spends more money on than space exploration.” I appreciate the tip of the hat and the...

Greetings, new readers!

My thanks go out to author Joseph Stromberg at Vox, who wrote a great piece posted today with the title “7 surprising things the government spends more money on than space exploration.” I appreciate the tip of the hat and the link to this site–especially given past experiences with other sites ripping off text without giving credit.

It’s also a friendly nudge. It’s been almost a year since I last updated this site! The lack of entries certainly hasn’t been due to a lack of material; instead, it’s just been due to a lack of time. With a day job that is equal parts awesome and intense, and with impending fatherhood, this site’s fallen by the wayside.

But Joseph’s article is well timed, since my wife was just mentioning recently that I should really carve out some time to resurrect this site.

So, consider me nudged. New posts coming again soon.

Edit: By soon, I meant 2017ish. Honest.

When you run a site devoted to cataloging how much money companies and particularly the government spend on various different projects, Tax Day is kind of like Christmas. A terrible, terrible Christmas. So, you were probably expecting a lot of April...

When you run a site devoted to cataloging how much money companies and particularly the government spend on various different projects, Tax Day is kind of like Christmas. A terrible, terrible Christmas.

So, you were probably expecting a lot of April 15th-themed posts here on the Costs More Than Space tumblr yesterday. Well, don’t worry: they are coming. But yesterday, I took a break from the site to spend some after-hours time with friends new and old as part of the first ever XPRIZE LOOP event. I got to share the stage with the gentlemen pictured here: Philippe Cousteau Jr. (yes, that Cousteau) of EarthEcho.org, Kevin Lieber of VSauce, and Leo Camacho of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. We had a lively and informative debate broadly themed around “Space vs. Oceans.” Obviously, the correct answer is “Both! Lots of Both!” but nevertheless, we exchanged some playful banter, some big ideas, and some thoughts about the state of exploration for each of these critical areas.

It was a fun event, put on by a number of cool organizations–XPRIZE, public radio station KCRW, and YouTube Space LA. If you are into the kinds of things we talk about here on Costs More Than Space, I hope you’ll consider following along with and supporting the non-profit XPRIZE Foundation and the teams competing for the various prizes: doing so is a great way to accomplish a lot of things without having to spend very much.

Oh, and if anyone wants to start up a Costs More Than Oceans tumblr, I would link the $#!% out of that.

space exploration oceans cousteau vsauce xprize
What costs more than space exploration? Mistakes made by government unemployment benefit programs. As reported by the LA Times, the State of California is about $516 million poorer than it should be. A recent audit uncovered the fact that the state’s...

What costs more than space exploration? Mistakes made by government unemployment benefit programs.

As reported by the LA Times, the State of California is about $516 million poorer than it should be. A recent audit uncovered the fact that the state’s Employment Development Department had missed out on a chance to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars that had been overpaid to unemployment recipients, via a federal program. Admittedly, doing so would have required a $323,000 investment in software. A tidbit of relevant information, courtesy of the LA Times: “the state’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund became insolvent in January 2009.” Ouch! They go on to quote the audit, which notes that California “has borrowed about $10 billion to cover the deficit and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in interest on the money it has borrowed." 

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the country (almost the same line of latitude, in fact), the Commonwealth of Virginia recently invested some money in space exploration. Specifically, Virginia constructed a new launch pad, Pad 0A, and associated infrastructure at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, which is essentially the commercial portion of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. The pad was built to attract and support the business of the Antares rocket, one of two American-built rockets currently capable of delivering cargo to the International Space Station. Even after a lawsuit, the total cost of the pad has been reported as $90 million. Interestingly enough, the cost of development of the Antares rocket itself–borne not by the Commonwealth of Virginia but instead by NASA and by Orbital Sciences Corporation, the company that built it, has been reported as $472 million; meaning that California’s unemployment oversight could have paid for about 90% of the total cost of a new rocket and a new launch pad to go with it.

(Photos via the State of California and a NASA Flickr Account, used via creative commons license) 

NASA space exploration california unemployment rockets
What costs more than space exploration? Money that has ‘gone missing’ from the US State Department. Three weeks ago, the office of the Inspector General of the US State Department sent a memo to the Under Secretary of State for Management and the...

What costs more than space exploration? Money that has ‘gone missing’ from the US State Department. 

Three weeks ago, the office of the Inspector General of the US State Department sent a memo to the Under Secretary of State for Management and the Assistant Secretary for Administration noting that it had identified “contracts with a total value of more than $6 billion in which contract files were incomplete or could not be located at all.” As an example of how that $6 billion figure was reached, the memo notes that “a recent OIG audit of the closeout process for contracts supporting the U.S. Mission in Iraq revealed that contracting officials were unable to provide 33 of 115 contract files requested in accordance with the audit sampling plan. The value of the contracts in the 33 missing files totaled $2.1 billion. Forty-eight of the 82 contract files received did not contain all of the documentation required by [federal accounting regulations].” Now, when I read that and the other examples in this memo, it is unclear to me if this means that the projects meant to be covered by those 33 files were paid for and not done, if they were paid for and done but not cataloged, or something else. The media, though, has widely interpreted this $6 billion as money down the drain, rather than money wisely spent but poorly tracked. Importantly, this $6 billion was lost / mis-catalogued over the course of about 6 years; the missing funds therefore total about 2% of the agency’s spending over those years.

What else could we have done with that money? Well, if that money were to somehow show up under the doormat at the US Capitol building in an unmarked envelope with a note of apology, and if Congress were decided to spend it all on space exploration, it would go along way. In fact, the entire President’s Budget Request for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate–the part of NASA that covers all of its active and developing science missions–for fiscal year 2015 is less than $5.2 billion.

(Graphics are all public domain US government images and logos)

(Also, now seems like as good a time as any to reminder readers that this blog is a personal project not affiliated with my employer, and that I’m trying very hard not to include my own personal judgments about what is and is not a good thing to spend money on–I’m just providing context here).

NASA science state department government waste
What costs more than space exploration? Daylight Savings Time. If you live in the United States, you’ve almost certainly experienced something like this: you forget about Daylight Savings Time completely, and arrive at work one hour late, only to get...

What costs more than space exploration? Daylight Savings Time.

If you live in the United States, you’ve almost certainly experienced something like this: you forget about Daylight Savings Time completely, and arrive at work one hour late, only to get chewed out. Or you miss a key meeting, or you are late and miss your flight. Or perhaps you remembered Daylight Savings Time after all, and you diligently woke up an hour earlier than your body really wanted to, and you noticed that the drivers on your morning commute were a little less attentive and a little more ornery than usual, and then when you got to work, thanks to the lack of sleep and the missing hour, you fell behind, and you just get more and more behind, to the point that a month goes by before you post on your Tumblr site. When you add all of those kinds of effects up across hundreds of millions of Americans, that impact starts to become pretty meaningful. So meaningful, in fact, that a study from Chmura Economics & Analytics indicated that the cost of Daylight Savings Time in 2013 could be as high as $434 million in the USA alone, as reported by Business Insider. Other estimates have placed the economic impact of Daylight Savings Time at about $1.7 billion per year in the USA. 

In 2013, the same year that Chmura estimates we Americans grumpily dialed our clocks forward one government-mandated hour at a cost of some $434 million, NASA launched several amazing missions of unmanned space exploration. Included amongst them were the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, IRIS, and the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE). I’ve covered LADEE previously, but you may also have read about it in the news recently, since it is about to be deliberately smashed into the Moon. Whereas LADEE studies the Moon, IRIS is studying the Sun; particularly, the awesome-sounding Chromosphere. The LADEE mission cost the taxpayers $263 million, while IRIS cost taxpayers an additional $120 million (I don’t think this includes the ~$40 million launch). This means that these two space missions together cost about $423 million… about $11 million less than that year’s Daylight Savings ritual.

(Photos via Wikimedia Commons and public domain NASA images)

NASA space exploration Sun moon daylight savings
What costs more than space exploration? The Draft. (Not the NFL draft, the NBA draft, or any other sports league draft–the military draft). If you are an American male, chances are that at some point you had to register with the US Selective Service...

What costs more than space exploration? The Draft. (Not the NFL draft, the NBA draft, or any other sports league draft–the military draft).

If you are an American male, chances are that at some point you had to register with the US Selective Service System. For those of you not familiar with it, the Selective Service System is, in their own words, “a small, independent federal agency [that] is America’s only proven and time-tested hedge against underestimating the number of active duty and reserve component personnel needed in a conflict.” (I like that the agency also describes itself as “the last link between society at large and today’s all-volunteer Armed Forces,” which sounds like the copy on the back of a post-apocalyptic novel.) That’s right: they are the ones who run the draft. Despite the fact that US law at present does not actually permit the government to run a draft, and the fact that no draft has been held since 1973, Selective Services nevertheless collects and keeps information on all male US Citizens between the ages of 18-25, just in case. (Women, who have experienced some significant expansions in their role in the US Armed Services in recent years, are not required to register). According to the General Accountability Office, as of 2012 the US Department of Defense had “not reevaluated requirements for the Selective Service System since 1994”–a time period in which several wars were fought without the need for a draft. The GAO report goes on to point out several reasons why the agency is not needed in the modern era, even should there ever be a need for another draft. Nevertheless, the Selective Service System’s budget in fiscal year 2012 was $24 million.

A few months after that report was delivered by the GAO, a team of researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics delivered an Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph for integration into the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN). The instrument is designed to collect planet-wide measurements of some of the key chemicals in the thin Martian atmosphere, and to help us figure out what the Martian atmosphere is indeed so thin. Those of us who enjoy living on a planet with atmosphere can appreciate the value of figuring out what happened over at our neighbor’s place. The total cost of the IUVS instrument was $20 million.

space exploration NASA Mars maven atmosphere draft selective service
What costs more than space exploration? Tea. I spent most of last week visiting London for work (hence the slow rate of posts on this Tumblr), where I was reminded of a fundamental fact that sometimes gets obscured here in the USA: there are a lot of...

What costs more than space exploration? Tea.

I spent most of last week visiting London for work (hence the slow rate of posts on this Tumblr), where I was reminded of a fundamental fact that sometimes gets obscured here in the USA: there are a lot of people in the world who really, really like tea. Whether black, white, green, red, white, yellow, or oolong, and whether hot or iced, tea drinks, tea products, and tea culture are big business throughout much of the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, some 4 billion kilograms of tea were consumed worldwide in 2010. The US isn’t generally considered a tea-drinking nation, but even here, tea is a popular beverage. According to the Tea Association of the USA, Americans consumed more than 3.60 billion gallons of tea (mostly black tea, and mainly iced) in 2012. In various different forms (ready-to-drink iced teas, wholesale purchases of tea leaves for home brewing, and restaurant purchase of teas), tea constituted a $9.79 billion market in the US in 2012, according to the same group.

To pull a specific example, Bigelow Tea–a family-owned tea company based in the Connecticut and with sales (and its plantation) in the US–has an annual market of approximately $140 million, according to the company’s President.

In 1999, Robert Bigelow–the founder and owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain; no relation to the Bigelow Tea family, at least as far as I can tell–started a new aerospace company called Bigelow Aerospace. A few years later, Bigelow licensed the technology from a cancelled NASA project called TransHab, which was developing inflatable space modules–essentially blow-up space stations and planetary bases that could one day hold astronaut crews. For a small fee (according to Bloomberg Businessweek: $40,000). From there, Bigelow has worked hard to develop the technology to the point where he can offer inflatable space stations to governments, private companies, and individuals. In July 2006 and in June 2007, Bieglow launched small modules into space. The larger of these, Genesis II, encloses 11.5 cubic meters of useable volume–you can track Genesis II’s current position online. Then, in December 2012, Bigelow signed a deal with NASA wherein a Bigelow module would be added to the International Space Station sometime in 2015–adding a 565 cubic feet space in which the astronauts can live and work.

Bigelow is a privately owned company, so exact financials are difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, Mr. Bigelow has summarized the company’s total level of spending a few times: in 2006, shortly after the launch of the Genesis I module, Bigelow reported he’d spent about $75 million in total throughout the history of the company, whereas big 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek was reporting a total expenditure on the order of $250 million. NASA’s contract with Bigelow for the new ISS module totals $17.8M.  

Using the above numbers, if drinkers of Bigelow tea decided to kick the tea habit for a year and instead by some space onboard a Bigelow module attached to the ISS, they could add an additional ~4,444 cubic feet to the station, increasing the habitable volume of the station by about a third.

space exploration tea bigelow space stations inflatables
What costs more than space exploration? Paying off our student loans. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–an independent federal agency established by the US Government in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis and resulting...

What costs more than space exploration? Paying off our student loans.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–an independent federal agency established by the US Government in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis and resulting recession–some time in early 2012, the total level of outstanding student loan debt in the US surpassed the $1 trillion mark. By May 2013, that number had further grown to more than $1.2 trillion. Almost all of those student loans ultimately come from the federal government: as of May 2013, loans held or guaranteed by the federal government accounting for more than $1 trillion of that $1.2 trillion total.  As the Bureau notes, many families utilize home equity loans, credit cards, and loans from retirement plans to pay for educational expenses. As a result, debt incurred for higher education may actually be much larger than the $1.2 trillion estimate.   

As referenced previously on this site, the White House Office of Management and Budget maintains logs of federal outlays (the amount actually spent, rather than the amount budgeted or appropriated) by agency by fiscal year. Cobbling together numbers for the years prior to the start of OMB’s records, it turns out that the total outlays on NASA from the day of its creation through the end of government fiscal year 2012 total $492.5 billion. If those numbers are adjusted for inflation on an annual basis, using this Consumer Pricing Index-based inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total spending on NASA from its creation through the end of FY2012 was equivalent to $1.02 trillion in 2012 dollars. 

It’s likely that at some point in Summer 2013, the current amount of outstanding debt on student loans given or guaranteed by the US government exceeded the inflation-adjusted total cost of NASA throughout its entire history to date.

(Photo: Artwork from a Flickr user, plus NASA’s 50 year anniversary logo.)

student loans NASA Space exploration Debt
What costs more than space exploration? Advertisements for prescription drugs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, pharmaceutical companies spent “at least $20.5 billion” promoting their drugs in 2008. The breakdown of that number is...

What costs more than space exploration? Advertisements for prescription drugs.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, pharmaceutical companies spent “at least $20.5 billion” promoting their drugs in 2008. The breakdown of that number is interesting: only about $4.7 billion of that money was spent on the direct-to-consumer advertising that probably came to mind when you first read the statistic, such as the television advertising where they cheerfully list of potential side effects. A much larger sum of approximately $12 billion was spent on ‘detailing’ to doctors, nurse practitioners, and physicians assistants; in this case, detailing basically means phone calls and one-on-one meetings with the health care professionals who write prescriptions to provide background information on each drug. A further $3.4 billion was spent on sponsoring professional meetings for health care professionals, with a remaining $400 million spent buying advertising in professional journals. To my surprise, this total spending on promotion was nearly half of the total amount spent on pharmaceutical R&D in the same year ($38 billion). Of course, the total profits in the same year were $189 billion. Amongst the various drugs, erectile dysfunction medication not surprisingly (at least to anyone who has ever watched TV at any point in the past decade) had the highest expenditure on direct-to-consumer advertising, but was below average amont the ten drug classes studied by the CBO in terms of detailing expenditures; Statins (used to lower cholesterol levels) were the subject of the largest detailing spend (and presumably the largest overall spend).

According to the White House Office of Management and Budget, In fiscal year 2008, NASA’s total outlays (The amount actually spent by NASA, which sometimes differs from the amount appropriated by Congress) were $17.8 billion.

(Photo: A GLeeMONEX art print available for purchase from the artist and the NASA logo.)

space exploration nasa big pharma pharmaceuticals kids in the hall