On NASA funding...

Submitted by David on Thu, 2012-05-17 12:17

NASA apparently is 0.4% of the US federal budget - how much of an impact does it have though?

(The clip claims that the $850 billion bank bailout was more than all 50 years of NASA funding put together - looks like NASA got about $57 billion between 1960-1973. Not sure what that'd work out to on an inflation adjusted basis).

HT: Andrey

Comments

Ronik

Sat, 2012-05-19 00:30

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off

It looks like quite a bit to me. Example: LED lights, artificial limbs, solar panels are key things which have quite a bit behind it. I'm pretty sure there's a rather sizable chunk of our current technology which owes at least partial credit to NASA... That link was just from 20 seconds of googling, I'm sure you could find more. Not to mention of course actually travelling through space, which allows us to improve our understanding of space and physics, which improves technologies.