Sibling comment (dmd): > I saw a study a few years ago where people were asked how much funding various agencies get, and the majority of people thought NASA was more than 10% of the federal budget; some even went as high as 25%. (It's less than half of 1%.)
Your comment: > [NASA’s] $23 billion dollar budget is only 3% of the size of the DOD budget.
NASA’s budget is about half a percent of total DoD budget, but that doesn’t tell an accurate story. Most people assume NASA is synonymous with the total or almost total US space budget, but its less than half. You can do the math in 2022 if you would like [0], but in 2013 NASA’s budget was $16.8B [1], and the total space budget was $39.3B [2]. According to that article, in 2013 every other nation was supposedly under a $10B space budget [2], but can’t really speak to the validity of that. I think it’s reasonable to say we spend a decent amount on space compared to others. All that said, not opposed to an increased space budget, more space is good in my book.
[0] https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/which-countries-spend...
Interesting tidbit: In constant 2020 dollars, peak NASA spending during Apollo was only twice today's budget.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://www.statista.com/statistics/264494/nasas-budget/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend...
*The third link says 2012, but it covers through 2020.
>Challenger & Columbia. Challenger wasn’t a NASA problem, it was a Politicians & Bureaucracy problem.
NASA managers overrode the recommendations of the engineers. That was absolutely a NASA problem. Sure they were under some political pressure, but they made the wrong call in the face of strong data. Columbia too was a management priorities problem.
That being said, NASA is doing great science. NASA is compromised of humans so they are therefore imperfect, but I would also love to see them get more support. Their $23 billion dollar budget is only 3% of the size of the DOD budget.
As far as SpaceX, they are a NASA subcontractor, executing goals specified by NASA. I don't understand your concern. (SpaceX also has a thriving private satellite business of course.) The entire Apollo program was executed by NASA paid subcontractors. That is how NASA operates. Their primary role is to spec, subcontract, and manage. SpaceX is doing things for less money than other subcontractors, so they are helping NASA's budget.