I immediately thought about this as well, however I seem to recall reading somewhere (and I could be entirely wrong here) that NASA has a requirement to give away freely their science data.
(If they distributed their science data in printed form, surely they'd be allowed to charge people for the cost of printing & mailing the paper copies; that's quite different from charging for the data itself.)
I’m willing to bet NASA saves a ton of money by going to a cloud provider- US government storage setups are insanely expensive. I remember a project I was on got a quote of over $10,000/TB in 2014, and there is no way egress is actually free right now- they are paying for a government regulation compliant internet connection one way or another.
I do worry about vendor lock in to a degree, but I’m confident the agency and tax payers would save money going to any major cloud provider.
You'd be buying something like an EMC vMax that can sustain 1M+ IOPS on lots of 15K spinning drives, with caching tiers on crazy expensive flash.
To support that, you need a fibre channel network layer and a bunch of FTEs to attend to it. Usually compliance requirements require segmentation of roles, which increases cost. If you're a federal government entity, those FTEs are most likely contractors billed out at $125-300/hr. Figure $3-5M/year on labor costs alone, although that may be divided out over multiple systems.
This happens in commercial business too. I had a buddy who was making about $150k in NYC to zone luns on a SAN. Basically he kept a spreadsheet and updated a specific configuration setting 2-3x a day and spent about 60-90 minutes/day doing that. The rest was waiting or studying for his MBA.
It's pretty wacky to compare S3 to this type of storage.
200 iops per drive from 2.5" 15KRPM is good going....
Edit:iops auto spellings
I've operated pretty significant government shared infrastructures like this in the past... we were offering fast, flash-cached disk in 2010 for about $5,000/TB. $10k/TB is not unreasonable for highly available Tier-1 storage for something like SAP, especially in that era where you couldn't use all flash in most case.
Today, cost structures can be very different. You can land high-iop storage for a fraction of the cost without the overhead of a big SAN. If you need capacity focused storage, that is also much cheaper.
An agency like NASA gets hosed on services, and cloud is no different. AWS is probably a net savings for operational workloads whose characteristics are known. Backup is a no-brainer. But for a high-volume, operationally highly variable thing like a public archive of data, AWS a square peg in a round hole because of the metered access.
The overall system ended up with worse capabilities than it should have had, but it did ship.
If 1-2TB drives were handily $1k in 2010 (2005 $1K hot you 128GB 15KRPM)
and your array set is at least R10,
already raw storage is approaching half of ten thousand dollars.
And this ignores controllers, cabling and chassis.
And this is before we look at our storage software licenses.
Is backup, point in time SLA, replication and availability in this budget?
Charging the user for data, even if it is on a marginal cost basis, conflicts with a mandate to give data away freely. Because “at the marginal cost of delivery” is not “free”.
(It's true that it is common for mandates to specify something like at marginal cost of delivery rather than free—sunshine laws providing copies of public records often work that way—but that's not the applicable mandate here; in fact, since without the separate mandate here the data would be available on a marginal cost basis under FOIA, the main reason for a separate mandate is to negate that cost.)
I found https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPD&c=2230&s=1, which mentions things like "Ensure public access...", but I don't see anything there mandating such public access to necessarily be at zero cost.
Requiring you to pay S3 is little different than requiring you to have Internet access, and thus pay whichever company includes you in THAT monopoly, IMO.
Imagine for a moment that in order to access NASA data sets you had to have a Fastmail email account. Gmail won't work, Outlook won't work, it has to be Fastmail alone.
That would be very objectionable (as much as I adore Fastmail).
Ability to pay one specific cloud provider should not be a gate for public domain government data.