President Donald Trump recently signalled his commitment to America’s space programme with a $208 million increase in funding for NASA, taking the total to $19.5bn. That may seem like a glorious return to the space race, but the truth is actually a little more mundane.
NASA’s budget reached its highest ever point in 1966 during the Apollo missions, when it hit $5.9bn – and although that sounds like nearly a quarter of what it is now, in today’s money that comes to around $43.5bn: a pretty unsustainable 4.41% of the total federal budget. Back then, space was demonstrably a bigger priority than it is today, where it takes up a reedy 0.47% of the budget – the lowest it’s been since 1959, when NASA was just two years old. In fact, the country as a whole spends more on pizza than it does on space exploration (albeit with a disappointing lack of state subsidy).
And yet, despite successive generations of US governments putting space science on the backburner, NASA is still the world’s most funded space agency, as the chart below from our friends at Statista demonstrates. The US spends more than three times as much as Europe, nine times as much as China and over seven times as much as old cold war rivals Russia.