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Comment by adventureful | Hacker News Reader

I like the part where austerity means your spending goes up substantially, and or stays similar.

NASA budget:

1987: $7.5b | 1990: $12.4b | 1993: $14.3b | 2001: $14.1b | 2006: $15.1b | 2007: $15.8b | 2008: $17.3b | 2009: $17.7b | 2010: $18.7b | 2011: $18.4b

They're doing just fine.

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Correct it for inflation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

Also, consider the fact that congress allocates the money going to individual project, not just the agency as a whole. NASA is not doing just fine.

Also, during the W administration much of the money for real science was redirected towards a manned mission to Mars. This caused terrible financial woes for the department I worked at at MIT for many years that does X-ray astronomy (The Center for Space Research). Quite a few people were laid off, including me, due to the CSR not being able to get the science funding from NASA it always had been able to get previously.

It's a classic anti-science move of forcing them to commit to an impossible project and then later lay into them for not making any progress and cut funding even more severely.

I saw the inflation calculation in the Wiki tables. You could even argue that inflation calculation is low, and that inflation has been far worse given the price of gold / oil / housing over the last 30 years.

My point was: NASA is doing just fine. They're fortunate to still be getting that much money year in year out. It's a lot of money.

You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading.

7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.

So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?

15.1 -> 18.4 is still a 22% increase. That's arguably "no effective increase" if you're counting per capita, but if NASA is the type of public good that offers the same amount of value whether population increases or not, I don't think a 22% is too bad. It just looks sad next to the other categories that have increased so much more.

It's an increase of 0.8% per year. And if the time series happened to have been started at 1988 -- there was a big increase in NASA's budget between 1987 and 1988 -- it would have been about 0.16% per year instead.

(Incidentally, something is definitely wrong with Wikipedia's figures, which show the nominal budget going up $7.6M -> $9.1M but the inflation-adjusted budget going down $17.7M -> $14.5M between 1987 and 1988.)

The goods provided by NASA are things like technological innovation, scientific discovery, and sheer coolness, all of which (it seems to me) provide net benefit proportional to the population. And the tax revenues available to fund it are kinda-sorta proportional to population too, even ignoring economic growth. So an increase of, at most, 22% over a 25-year period during which the population has grown by about 28% and the inflation-adjusted GDP by about 2x ... yes, I think that is too bad.

Or what could they do with a more intelligently allocated budget of the same or lower dollar amount?

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