Over on Dangerous Talk, Staks answered a question and it’s a good, important article. One of his commenters, asked a question and that’s what I want to explore.
I wonder how far our space program would come if we alotted 200bn USD a year? That’s a third of DOD spending.
– Corey Firepony
I answered, quite glibly, that we could have colonies on the moon, Mars and be mining the asteroid belt. We could even have a near c probe heading for another star… using today’s technology. But I really want to explore this further.
The NASA budget over the last 15 years has slowly risen from a low of 13.4 billion US dollars to the current 17.7 billion dollars. All the things that we think of with NASA in the past decade was done for for less than 1/3 of what the Department of Defense gets every single year.
According to a 2009 NASA report (based on this PDF), the cost of the entire Apollo program including all R&D, 15 Saturn Vs, 12 Lunar Modules, flight ops, maintenance and support was (in 2005 dollars) $170 billion. We could have a complete space program again, for 1/3 of one year of the DoD budget.
But we’d still have $30 billion left over, which is twice the current NASA budget. According to the 2014 budget request (PDF), NASA spends about 1/3 of their budget on science ($5 billion), with the majority going to Earth science. Without a detailed breakdown, I’ll assume that means things like remote sensing. That is, using satellites for research on Earth; atmospheric monitoring, wave action, pollution, etc. They give half a billion dollars to commerical spaceflight programs and spend another couple billion on technology and aeronautics. This doesn’t include the $3 billion spent on the ISS.
Now, increase all of that by 50%. That what NASA could do with a budget of $200 million dollars… in one year. That is increase all their current spending by 50% AND completely build, from the ground up, the entire Apollo space program.
