Americans clueless on NASA budgets
Space: Not as expensive as you think
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 19th November 2007 17:17 GMT

A recent survey, carried out on behalf of The Space Review, has revealed that the average American believes a quarter of the country's public purse goes towards funding NASA.

The survey found that most people reported the belief that NASA is almost as well funded as the military. The Department of Defense does receive roughly 21 per cent of the nation's wonga, but most people overestimated this by a further 12 per cent.

In reality, NASA gets something like 0.6 per cent of the natonal budget, a fact which researchers report came as a surprise to those being surveyed. According to The Space Review, one participant replied "No wonder we haven’t gone anywhere!".

The survey formed part of a larger analysis of the costs and benefits of having a publicly funded space agency. The writers argue that people have scant knowledge of what NASA actually does. Combined with the huge overestimates of the cost of running NASA, it is not surprising that people often regard it as being poor value for money.

Source article


Alex01: An people actually complain!

The Apollo Program, for instance, cost about 4 cents per day for every American for the duration of the program. Apollo 11 cost each American about $2.00 each.

A poor value for the money? One wonders where people get these crazy ideas...

I remember reading somewhere that the average American spent more on bubble-gum than Apollo.

I remember reading somewhere that the average American spent more on bubble-gum than Apollo.

It rather makes the debate about the cost of space exploration a little dumb...don't you think?

I always considered space flight very expensive due to it's complexity, safety measures, and other factors. But as I read the article, I realised I was incorrect, I still cannot understand how space flight demands such a low amount of money. Believe it or not this cought me by surprise.

NASA's manned space exploration project budget for FY 2007 (Exploration Systems Mission Directorate) was about 3 billion dollars.
That's about $10.00 for each American, a bit less 3 cents per day.
This is what we're spending on Constellation, an expansive program designed to expand human presence in space and provide untold benefits.

3 cents a day.

Do you know how much money is going to be spent on Christmas in the next month?
Let's not go for the total...that's frightening. Let's just look at the next month's ON-LINE expenditures.


It'll be a relatively small fraction of the total "Holiday Season" expenditure in the U.S., but it'll still be 40 BILLION DOLLARS...on...Christmas shopping.

Let's see...

Christmas shopping (on-line, mind you) will be 40 billion dollars in the next 30 days.
That's $4.50 +/- for every person in this country, every day for the next month!

About enough money to fund 2 Apollo programs in their entirety, in a month ( ) and about 150 times what we spend on NASA' exploration project at the moment.

We could fund a complete return to the Moon (the next 10-12 years of Constellation, likely) with three Christmas on-line shopping months!

We will far and away exceed NASA's FY 2007 Space Exploration budget between November 23 and December 6 of this year...buying Christmas stuff.

There was some talk about the price tag being too high???

I am frequently amazed at this high price of space exploration talk.
The reality is that it is cheap.