“This Administration has never really faced up to where we are going in space… As a result, NASA is both drifting and lobbying for bigger things — without being able to focus realistically on what it should be doing.”
-White House staff assistant Clay Thomas Whitehead, February 1971
What should we be doing with respect to our space program? At its peak — the mid-1960s — the US government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today?
Image credit: OMB Historical Budget Tables.
That number is down to 3%, the lowest it’s ever been. As far as our priorities as a nation go, is this right?
In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that we should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do, despite all the we could (and won’t) accomplish if our funding would increase.
Image credit: NASA / Science@NASA.
Needless to say, I think we need to rethink this defeatist point of view. What’s your opinion?
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