A report warns that NASA’s future is getting worse.

A new study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) makes me very worried about the future of NASA, which is the United States’ main space agency. A group of flight experts came up with the results, which show that NASA may have a “hollow future” if important problems aren’t fixed.

The NASEM study points out a number of major issues that NASA is having. One of the biggest problems is that the agency doesn’t get enough money, which is because the country is paying less attention to aviation and public space research. Because of this lack of money, short-term fixes and poor ways of running things have become the norm. The study also says that NASA’s infrastructure is old and has already passed its useful life, which makes operating problems worse.

The people who wrote the study stress that NASA’s staff is decreasing because of competition from private aircraft companies. This loss of talented people, along with the fact that schools aren’t getting enough money to train the next crop of experts, could make the agency even less effective.

Norman Augustine, the report’s lead author and a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, was worried that if things keep going the way they are, NASA may lose its ability to solve problems and become only an inspection group. He says that even though it will be hard to get more money from Congress, NASA should focus on setting priorities for its strategic goals to stay relevant and useful.

The NASEM study is a stark reminder of the problems NASA is facing and stresses the need for more funding and long-term planning to make sure the agency continues to be successful in space research.