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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

“NASA is criminally under-resourced”

They have a $22 billion annual budget. SpaceX’s annual revenue this year is projected to be about $8 billion and profitable for the first time. SpaceX launch’s more rockets and puts more satellites into space than the rest of the world combined on revenue about 1/3rd of NASA’s budget.

NASA isn’t criminally underfunded they are criminally inefficient.

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I must have missed when SpaceX created space telescopes and sent probes to Mars, the Sun, Europa, Titan, interstellar space...

NASA also plays a key role in collecting meteorological data.

They're doing a bit more than just launching rockets.

> space telescopes and sent probes to Mars, the Sun, Europa, Titan, interstellar space... meteorological data.

All of that is great, but how much of NASA's budget is going to the Artemis/SLS boondoggle?

29.3%, as directed by Congress. Not all of this allocation goes to Artemis/SLS, it's for the totality of all the lunar projects for which these projects comprise the largest part.

Well I wouldn't entirely disagree - I should clarify that congressional projects like the SLS are wasteful nonsense. The parts of NASA that I think are under-resourced are planetary science, advanced propulsion etc. Research, in other words.

NASA doesn't build or launch spacecraft. They pay companies such as SpaceX to do it for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

I'm still going to blame the parties that set the budget and oversee spending: Congress.

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