Let’s just kill that rumor and blatant lie right now:
The total projected amount of federal dollars that NASA will have spent, when spread out over its’ past forty-nine year history (1958-2007) amounts to $419.420 billion dollars — an average of $8.559 billion per year.
Now, compare that to the yearly (that’s ONE year) budgets of any ONE of these federal agencies for the new Fiscal Year (2007) that just started on Oct. 1:
$586.1 billion – Social Security
$481.8 billion – Defense
$394.5 billion – Medicare
$367.0 billion – Unemployment and welfare
$276.4 billion – Medicaid and other health related
$243.7 billion – Interest on debt
$89.9 billion – Education and training
$76.9 billion – Transportation
$72.6 billion – Veterans’ benefits
$43.5 billion – Administration of Justice
$33.1 billion – Natural resources and environment
$32.5 billion – Foreign affairs
$27.0 billion – Agriculture
$26.8 billion – Community and regional development
$20.1 billion – General government
BTW — NASA’s budget for 2007 is $16.3 billion.
That works out to about $55 a year out-of-pocket for you, the average taxpayer – or roughly $1.06 a week (or $0.15 cents a day).
Please explain to all of us how you propose to save the world on 15 cents a day.
Trying to estimate the economic value of the Apollo program to the US is surprisingly easy. A 1971 NASA study by the Midwest Research Institute concluded that “The 25 billion in 1958 dollars spent on civilian space R & D during the 1958-1969 period has returned $52 billion through 1971 and will continue to produce pay-off through 1987, at which time the total pay off will have been $181 billion. The discounted rate of return for this investment will have been 33 percent.�
This statement is plausible since those were the years when NASA’s spending on Apollo was at its height, but NASA did invest in other programs and they are included in the mix, so the conclusion is not as definitive as one would like. Also, a 33 percent return on investment (ROI) is not really big enough to make the normal venture capitalist go wild. For a government program, however, it is quite respectable.
The real value of space exploration to our nation’s economy will be a subject of debate among experts for many years to come. Like the Apollo program, its impact will be hard to measure, but will be evident in the new industries that will spring up around it.
Supporters of space exploration have long known intuitively that the investments America has made in space technology have helped maintain the country as the world’s number one technological superpower. The infinitely complex nature of economic decision-making in a free market system may mean that no one will ever be able to show a direct cause and effect relationship — but that does not mean that it is not there.
Let’s just kill that rumor and blatant lie right now:
The total projected amount of federal dollars that NASA will have spent, when spread out over its’ past forty-nine year history (1958-2007) amounts to $419.420 billion dollars — an average of $8.559 billion per year.
Now, compare that to the yearly (that’s ONE year) budgets of any ONE of these federal agencies for the new Fiscal Year (2007) that just started on Oct. 1:
$586.1 billion – Social Security
$481.8 billion – Defense
$394.5 billion – Medicare
$367.0 billion – Unemployment and welfare
$276.4 billion – Medicaid and other health related
$243.7 billion – Interest on debt
$89.9 billion – Education and training
$76.9 billion – Transportation
$72.6 billion – Veterans’ benefits
$43.5 billion – Administration of Justice
$33.1 billion – Natural resources and environment
$32.5 billion – Foreign affairs
$27.0 billion – Agriculture
$26.8 billion – Community and regional development
$20.1 billion – General government
BTW — NASA’s budget for 2007 is $16.3 billion.
That works out to about $55 a year out-of-pocket for you, the average taxpayer – or roughly $1.06 a week (or $0.15 cents a day).
Please explain to all of us how you propose to save the world on 15 cents a day.
Trying to estimate the economic value of the Apollo program to the US is surprisingly easy. A 1971 NASA study by the Midwest Research Institute concluded that “The 25 billion in 1958 dollars spent on civilian space R & D during the 1958-1969 period has returned $52 billion through 1971 and will continue to produce pay-off through 1987, at which time the total pay off will have been $181 billion. The discounted rate of return for this investment will have been 33 percent.�
This statement is plausible since those were the years when NASA’s spending on Apollo was at its height, but NASA did invest in other programs and they are included in the mix, so the conclusion is not as definitive as one would like. Also, a 33 percent return on investment (ROI) is not really big enough to make the normal venture capitalist go wild. For a government program, however, it is quite respectable.
The real value of space exploration to our nation’s economy will be a subject of debate among experts for many years to come. Like the Apollo program, its impact will be hard to measure, but will be evident in the new industries that will spring up around it.
Supporters of space exploration have long known intuitively that the investments America has made in space technology have helped maintain the country as the world’s number one technological superpower. The infinitely complex nature of economic decision-making in a free market system may mean that no one will ever be able to show a direct cause and effect relationship — but that does not mean that it is not there.