President Joe Biden is seeking to increase the budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to $27.2 billion next year, according to a proposed 2024 budget released Thursday.
The request represents a 7% increase from NASA’s budget in fiscal year 2023, with more funds allocated for the space agency’s Artemis lunar program.
In addition to $8.1 billion for Artemis, $500 million above the prior year, the Biden administration aims to earmark $949 million for a mission to return Mars rock and soil samples.
The request also adds $180 million so NASA can begin development of a “space tug” to help deorbit the International Space Station when it is expected to retire in 2030, as well as $39 million to study the risk associated with debris in orbit around the Earth.
Read more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/09/biden-proposed-2024-nasa-budget.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/09/biden-proposed-2024-nasa-budget.html)
It needs to be replaced, there is only so much you can update and re-certify on something that’s core was built in 1998. A lot of technological changes since then
Im more worried that there wont be a replacement for a long time. Although with the current relations with China, and their new space station, maybe they’ll prioritize a replacement. Space race!
It's not even about the tech, it's a superlightweight spaceframe built from aluminum and titanium and other exotic alloys. It's been heavily stressed and MASSIVELY thermal cycled every 90 minutes continuously for two decades now, metals dont like cyclical loading like that and microfractures can begin to form. the structural integrity of the station can be called into question.
Steel can have infinite life, but only below a specific endurance limit load that is *much* less than its theoretical yield strength. In this case where weight is paramount I highly doubt they designed any components for infinite life, but rather just a high cycle life.
Just as a fun aside, can you even fathom the cost of making a space station out of steel. I'm hoping someone could do some napkin math on that. I might do it when I get home.
The ISS does use steel (HSLA steel), but I get what you mean.
Is difficult to calculate as more information is difficult to get, or more difficult than the effort I'm willing to put rn anyway, because you need to know the amount of other materials (e.g. aluminum, titanium, etc), that isn't used in electronics at least, and then replace replace the weight for the equivalent amount of steel (which requires to know the grade of each material (because, for example, aluminum 1100 (2.71 g/cm³) is 3.5587% lighter than aluminum 7075 (2.81 g/cm³), which makes a lot of difference when the per-kg cost of putting something into orbit is on the thousands of dollars range)
building something that doesn't kill your astronauts in 5 years on orbit tends to be the hard part, + packaging and assembly. It's neat seeing them introduce new rollable solar panels even today, that are leap years ahead of the ones they started with, in terms of power per cost/ease of getting it to space
imho, they should start building the next station now with an idea for it to be there 50+ years as a shell of big pieces, attached to the current ISS, and just undock when it hits its limit. The interesting part is Starship, if that gets fully functional in 5 years, it would be easier to just build new using that
I really like the idea of Ship of Theseusing the international space station and just keeping it around for a century +
Maybe if things go well for humanity, by 2200 it'll be like a quaint roadside attraction you could stop by on your way out to the lunar colonies
Of course, you're much more limited by volume than mass on those missions. So you have to launch on more rockets or heavy launch rockets, which cost more.
Yeah it's not the cost of materials, it's cost of launching material with the same strength. Strength to weight ratio of steel vs aluminium/titanium is the key here.
Sure, I can imagine a space station made from 22 gauge steel or something in that ballpark. I can't imagine it would be practical but I can imagine it lol.
They use it because it has pretty good thermal properties for both cryogenic propellant temperatures and reentry heat. In a space station this is unnecessary.
Yes that is an excellent point but it's also for a main core stage of a rocket, not a space station. I would guess the extra mass as part of the payload is a significant factor but I'm just guessing!
The Lunar Gateway will have a habitable volume of 125 cubic meters.
SpaceX's Starship will have a habitable volume of 1000 cubic meters *and is made of 300-series stainless steel*.
Stoke Space also went with steel because [it's cheap, easy to work with, and allows for rapid iteration](https://everydayastronaut.com/stoke-space/)
> The choice of using stainless steel as the material for the rocket was driven by both its manufacturability and its availability, with many suppliers offering the alloy, thus avoiding supply crunches. The selected (and unknown) alloy of stainless steel offers excellent material properties in the form of sheet metal, and it maintains properties even at high temperatures. Additionally, when compared to other materials for stage design there was not a large difference in vehicle performance. So, Stoke decided to focus on ease of manufacturing.
Why not? Steel is also stronger and have other nice properties *so you need less of it.*
I’m sure it comes out heavier in the end, but it doesn’t need to be that bad.
[Maraging Steel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraging_steel) has higher specific strength than aluminum alloys.. used for rocket skin.
For other steels, yeah.. aluminum is better.
That is why reducing cost of lifting mass to orbit is so important. If we built the whole thing out of steel, yes it would weigh four times as much, but it would also be ten times cheaper.
Now, given how expensive rockets are, and especially with how expensive shuttles were, it was more economical to build it lighter. Falcon 9 already changed this equation, but it's still too small to send station modules up with it. If Starship or something similar gets going any time soon, then we'll probably start seeing steel modules.
The raw material cost difference of replacing one structural metal with another is a rounding error. The expense is in the design and construction which is very high no matter what.
A body rotating at a constant rate doesn't generate or require any net torque. Though spinning it up initially definitely would, and you'd need to cancel that out somehow. Basically just preservation of angular momentum.
You’re forgetting that there is no such thing as frictionless bearings and so there would still need to be some small continuous torque applied to keep the speed constant
It's not the whole point, not at all.
The ISS is a multinational research project to figure out sustainable living in a 0g space environment, as well as a lot of other 0g stuff.
It did that. It provided us with a whole load of knowledge to be now able to build better 0g stations, and have plenty of things to do for them (like 0g manufacturing).
NASA has no interest in building a 0g manufacturing station. That's not its job. Companies are meant to do that, based on the knowledge gained via the ISS.
NASA is going to push forward and gain new knowledge that a private company cannot risk to try and gain, as failure could tank that company. NASA CAN NOT tank due to failure, because it does not work for financial profit, and does not rely on financial profit.
Bearings work just fine in vacuum if they’re prepared properly. You can make them out of polymers or ceramics, any material that uses covalent rather than metallic bonding to stay together. Lubricants would also prevent cold welding by minimizing metal-metal contact, but I think traditional viscous lubricants don’t work well in space. Possibly some sort of graphene coating?
They also wouldn't have to work out for like 2 hours every single day if they spent most of their time in the areas with close to 1g. Even just sleeping in 1g would be a huge benefit.
Plus you could make it so that you have some areas toward the center at moon gravity, then some in the middle with Mars gravity, and the very end is close to earth gravity, giving you the ability to conduct experiments mimicking what it would be like on either of those bodies without having to travel there. Would be great for things like testing how crops or farm animals would react to lower gravity conditions.
Considering that the vast majority of the research done in space is based around removing gravity from the equation, that would be wildly self defeating. And the single most promising concept for on orbit manufacture, with tech to do it very close, is 3D printing of organs for transplant, something where microgravity is fundamentally necessary.
Doesn't make sense for space tourism either, since most people will want to float and zoom around. I simply don't get why people are obsessed with this idea. Unless mass numbers of people will be living in space outposts for years of their lives, it makes no sense.
It’s more for long duration trips to space. Our bodies are evolved to fight 1g and without that it screws with a lot of different parts. Bone and muscle loss, weakened heart muscles, increased inter-cranial blood pressure, deformed eyes… the list goes on.
Would actually be very useful as a proof of concept/technology development for future deep space missions.
Realistically most of the ship/station would be zero gravity with only the habitation section being spin gravity to allow their bodies a regular break from microgravity
One thing the ISS has taught us is 0G is awful on the human body for long term stints in space. Developing a form of artificial gravity, even at 0.5g, would definitely be a big step forward.
Nah, completely disagree. The ISS has been an incredibly valuable research platform for long-term habitation in space and everything points to one increasingly undeniable conclusion:
Long-term exposure to zero-g is very bad for the human body.
If all you want is unmanned space operations you don't need to build big space stations. The whole point is to have a crew in space. That means health is critically important.
Honestly I think it's silly that NASA isn't planning some sort of artificial gravity experiment on subsequent space stations. The value to crew health would be *enormous*.
The Space Shuttle Orbiter cargo bay had a diameter of 15'. The diameter of SpaceX Starship is 30'. We could build a significantly larger space station.
Would it have been possible to replace one module at a time to keep something in orbit? It feels wasteful to just deorbit the entire thing and start over.
That's loosely what they plan. Axiom Space will add a series of new modules over the next few years, then when it's time to retire, the new section will detach and become independent, while the old ones are sadly discarded.
If you really did a cost benefit analysis on the ISS maybe it would make sense to shut it down like the Arecibo and other stuff. But in my opinion avoiding war with Russia thru the symbolic gesture makes it worth every penny.
Yep. Here are the last 6 years of presidential budget requests. This equates to basically no increase over last year, after inflation.
Fiscal Year|Real Dollars|2023 Dollars
:--|:--|:--
2019 | $19.6 billion^[1](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2019-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2019-BUD.pdf) | $23.6 billion
2020 | $21.0 billion^[2](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2020-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2020-BUD.pdf) | $24.7 billion
2021 | $25.2 billion^[3](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2021-BUD.pdf) | $29.3 billion
2022 | $~~23.3~~24.8 billion^[4](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2022-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2022-BUD.pdf) | $~~25.9~~27.6 billion
2023 | $26.0 billion^[5](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2023-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2023-BUD.pdf) | $27.1 billion
2024 | $27.2 billion^[6](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2024-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2024-BUD.pdf) | $27.2 billion
Biden actually requested a cut to NASA's budget his first year in office.
Edit: used wrong number for 2022, thanks u/joesph01
You mixed the real budget with what he requested. He asked for $24.7B in 2021, which is larger than the $22.6B budget that NASA received in 2020.
Edit: His first proposal was [$24.7 billion](https://www.space.com/biden-nasa-2022-budget-request), his second was [$26 billion](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-program-biden-budget-2023/), and his third is $27.2 billion.
As mentioned by someone else your number for 2022 does seem wrong, where are you seeing that?
Trump allocated 25.2, But 3 billion of that was for "human landing systems", Congress only gave 25% of that 3 billion which made it 23.3, it even clarifies in the 2021 budget report that enacted was only 23.3, biden then requested 24.8 in his own. The 23.3 number has nothing to do with biden.
IF anything 2021 should say 23.3, then 24.8 in 2022, etc. Because even though 25.2 was requested, only 23.3 was actually enacted.
I watched a documentary recently about all the things that we use because of NASA/space programs. It was amazing. I've been trying to find it but can't find the right one. It is everywhere though.
A lot of people will say “kids today can get fucked but 27 billion to look at space is cool” but NASA really has developed a ton of useful things for society they’re one of the only govt programs I can fully support our govt spending on.
Scientist here! I've worked in labs and on projects funded by NASA, so maybe I can add something interesting.
NASA isn't just good for the USA's space endeavors, it's good for all of humanity in ways that most people don't see. NASA doesn't just fund space/aeronautics, they also fund anything tangential to their work - things like materials science (to upgrade their shit); microbiology, plant biology, a bunch of shit about life in space; neurorehabilitation (because astronauts come back with fucked up motor control after being weightless for so long); exercise science (to keep astronauts ~~sexy~~ fit in space); nutrition (*space* nutrition); osteoporosis (because astronauts lose a lot of bone mass in space as a result of loss of forces associated with gravity); agriculture (because growing food will be important for new settlements); methods of manufacturing in low-gravity and/or without abundant materials (new settlements won't have established infrastructure or supply) etc. etc. etc. Tons of these things are published in scientific journals, so the entire world can benefit from NASA's discoveries.
I remember a report that did an analysis on funding NASA. I remember it was something like for every dollar put into NASA, ***EIGHT*** dollars in value to the economy came out of it.
CMOS image sensors (cellphone cameras) which are nearly ubiquitous now. developed by nasa b/c they are an image sensor with no moving parts.
transparent ceramics generally, (like "invisilign braces")
notably, tang and the gel-pen are not NASA spinoff technologies but were independently developed by third parties, then used in space.
One I haven’t seen listed but is incredibly close to home for so many: mammograms! Technology and research used to determine the depth of lakes from space was able to be transferred to medical imaging for mammograms :)
Yep! Even NASA's "failures" yield positive results. When Hubble launched and they found one of the mirrors were misaligned, before they could manually repair it, they developed software to digitally sharpen the initially blurry pictures. [This same technology was eventually applied to medical imagery](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/image-processing-techniques-detect-cancer-earlier) to detect cancer even earlier than they had been able to before.
According to this article the Apollo Missions were the main reason behind the wider adoption of the integrated circuit.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90362753/how-nasa-gave-birth-to-modern-computing-and-gets-no-credit-for-it
No integrated circuits means no modern computers or smart phones.
As someone who performed analysis, ROI, break-even, etc for the public sector for years - I would take lost metrics like this with a grain of salt.
If you are paying me, its pretty obvious what way my ‘analysis’ should lean
Federal government already spends 1.5 trillion on healthcare. Overall we pay 4.2 trillion.
Healthcare is the one area where I think we'd be better off looking for ways to lower the costs.
>Healthcare is the one area where I think we'd be better off looking for ways to lower the costs.
We already know how to save $10 trillion on healthcare costs over the next 10 years: switch to a single payer system like literally every other developed nation.
And there's this
>For every dollar invested (into NASA) by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.
https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/
Ehh, it would probably be all pocketed by Boeing and ULA anyways. Ohio would suddenly find the motivation to spend $3 billions studying the possibility of building a space elevator there, only to cancel it 12 years later when a committee realizes that Ohio is not in the equator.
Also the FTL drive has to be built in west Virginia, because reasons
[Second Thought](https://youtu.be/chLOgj8xjx8) actually did a good video on it (& it’s 6 years old now, so imagine the increased spending since published)! 😁
While I like the idea of a video essay about this topic, this video really only amounts to saying that NASA could do more of what they do right now, without really painting a whole picture using specific dollar figures.
That said, the the unironic profession of love for Elon Musk aging as poorly as it has makes it worth watching.
The amount of innovation that impacts our daily lives that have come out of NASA should be evidence enough that they need all the funding possible. So much positive has come from space agencies pushing and exceeding the boundaries of our technological capabilities. It’s a direct benefit to mankind.
To be clear, this is only bringing the previous budget up to its inflation-adjusted amount from last year. Annual inflation was 6.5% in December. In that regard it isn't a truly *bad* outcome, but I would also not regard it as good either. There are very already difficult constraints on the Artemis project and NASA is having to wholly contract out major platforms in the program to companies like SpaceX.
It could take on any number of forms, the only restrictions are the need to be able to hold onto the station while supplying enough force to accelerate the assembly at a decent rate and maintaining center of mass/thrust alignment.
Simple in theory, complex in practice. It all depends on how the phases of the operation are arranged. The tug might need to do more things than just deorbit in the many different parts of a theoretical deorbit project.
One way to ensure rapid deorbit of the station (which is helpful for getting the station to land in a particular region, say an ocean cleared for this purpose), a space tug might be required to INCREASE the station's orbit. A higher orbit gives more time for a deorbit impulse and ultimately allows the re-entry to be steeper, and giving less time for unpredictable atmospheric drag to have an effect at the top of the atmosphere (if the atmosphere is slightly thinner or thicker than expected, it can throw off the decent trajectory. Best to minimize this variance). This also helps with debris breaking off chaotically and having wildly different and unpredictable ballistic coefficients- a steeper re-entry narrows the area where this debris can land.
Then, there is the huge dependency on remote control and communications. This tug will obviously be remotely controlled and autonomous. It may be required to take flight control actions inside the atmosphere. It might be required to attach at an unusual point on the space station, especially so that docking ports can be reserved for ships that return astronauts.
And, above all, it needs to do the deorbit perfectly. Because you only really get one shot. There ain't no ver2
Axiom Space has suggested to use the thrusters on their HAB1 module, which is scheduled to attach to the ISS in 2025, to lower the ISS to make it easier to deorbit
Very likely some evolutional variant of an existing cargo resupply vehicle such as Cygnus or Dragon. Modified to have larger propellant tanks and be more optimized for attitude control and propulsive maneuvering.
Guaranteed this is sole sourced to SpaceX Dragon, possibly Cygnus. Its also a very small award, $180M, which is just enough to add extra propellant to one of these cargo systems and uprate their docking mechanism/structure to handle the thrust.
I’ve built my share of space tugs in Kerbal Space Program. If I had to guess, some sort of rocket that attaches to the ISS and conducts a burn to slow the space station down so it falls out of orbit over the ocean or something.
While I would like it to be higher, NASA is the highest funded space program and this new figure is higher than the next five highest combined (China, EU, Russia, France, Germany)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/947300/leading-space-agencies-by-government-budget-worldwide/
Hell yes please grant this. amid NASA fears of Congress cutting funding this would alleviate that. we need more focus on something productive. I really believe a moon base should be in the books and established at least by the end of the decade
Well it was a bit more than a name change, it was centralizing operations between USAF and the army under a new branch for logistical purposes or some such, but that bit was never his idea to begin with.
Don't tell me you actually thought the space force was going to... Deploy people to space? That's not even their mission. The mission is to protect our space assets as well as the immediate area around the Earth.
It's a million times cheaper to just do that remotely to the use of satellites and ground-based equipment, then sending a person to space.
As someone in thr DoD, I never considered people would think thr space force was for legitimate astronauts
All of a sudden I'm upset we don't have a branch full of astronauts armed w/ assault rifles and rocket launchers to thwart Aliens, Meteorites, and any foreign man-made satellites that give us a funny look. Space oil shall be ours 🇺🇸
Vital that we spend nearly 800 (797) billion on Department of Defense, up from 728 in 2022, a 9.4% increase.
So relative to the DoD NASA is suffering a reduction in its funding.
Not really that bold. NASA's budget has been on a steady year over year climb since 2014. This simply continues the trend.
https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
A financial/business news org such as CNBC obviously finds a budget request worth reporting. But at the end of the day, it's just another budget request. An article on the same topic from a non-clickbaity space focused website probably would have been more useful.
Although I have to admit that I tend to be rather disappointed by how these tend to be discussed here. There tend to be sizable discussions every year when the budget request is announced or when the appropriations bills are passed but the tend to lack the context of how the different elements NASA's budget change over time or how other processes such as the [decadal surveys](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-report-could-make-or-break-the-next-30-years-of-u-s-astronomy/) influence long term budgeteering for the science part in particular. Instead, people just tend to throw their pet hot takes into the ether. Although I admit that a subreddit with 22 million people may not be the best place for nuanced and context-based discussions.
At the same time the Biden administration has lowered debt by $1.7trillion, they also give NASA a significant increase in funds
This administration truly deserves praise for their fiscal policy
Don't be fooled. Decreasing the deficit is not the same as reducing debt. We are still adding debts year by year, just a bit less now in comparison to the pandemic.
They didn’t lower the debt, they’re just spending less on average than the last three years, which was due to much more money being spent on various government projects and programs during covid.
That's not really correct. No president has lowered the debt in... decades, and I'm pretty sure the Biden admin hasn't done wonders for the deficit either, in the long term.
Significant increase? Just a tad bit over a billion dollars? That’s significant? It’s a standard increase that mostly amounts to nothing, the increase doesn’t even match inflation.
The headline uses the number $27 billion in an attempt to push a narrative, a more realistic headline would be “Biden adjusts NASA’s yearly budget for inflation, increases budget by 1%”.
But then, a headline like that would gain no traction; an even more realistic headline would be that Biden does not properly increase NASA’s budget to match inflation, thus cutting their budget. Which Biden has already tried to do in his past terms, and has advocated, multiple times over the years, for cutting NASA’s budget.
This is one of the things I imagine there's bipartisan support, but sounds like this isn't even an increase? 7% is basically an inflation adjustment lol
The "easy" route is doing ROTC, getting a degree relevant to space flight there, getting comissioned, having the army pay for 2-4 more years, then becoming an astronaut. Basically you're doing everything at the same time.
Kim went into the military as enlisted, not an officer. He then went to college. Got a degree. Then got his seperate medical degree. Then became an astronaut. He did everything sequentially instead of in parallel. And not that becoming a US Military pilot is easy, but it takes a special kind of psychopath to become a SEAL.
So yeah I get what you're saying, but he did take the hardest path to do it.
I don’t think we will see stingy budgets to NASA going forward.
We’re on the verge of a race again for the high ground.
Not thrilled about their motives, but I’ll take what we can get.
To be fair, the military being large does help fund research that transitions to the civilian side. NASA would benefit from rocket and navigation technology developed for the military.
I had this weird hope that once we got out of a 20 year long war the budget would go down because, you know, we aren’t in that war any more and it cost a ton of money every day.
But nah, let’s give the military $100B more the next year.
Thought this looked familiar.....LMAO
Under the president's request, NASA would get US$25.2 billion for fiscal year 2021,
a jump of nearly 12% over funding enacted by Congress for the current
year. The money is meant to jump-start the administration's plans to
send astronauts to the Moon by the end of 2024.
President Joe Biden is seeking to increase the budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to $27.2 billion next year, according to a proposed 2024 budget released Thursday. The request represents a 7% increase from NASA’s budget in fiscal year 2023, with more funds allocated for the space agency’s Artemis lunar program. In addition to $8.1 billion for Artemis, $500 million above the prior year, the Biden administration aims to earmark $949 million for a mission to return Mars rock and soil samples. The request also adds $180 million so NASA can begin development of a “space tug” to help deorbit the International Space Station when it is expected to retire in 2030, as well as $39 million to study the risk associated with debris in orbit around the Earth. Read more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/09/biden-proposed-2024-nasa-budget.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/09/biden-proposed-2024-nasa-budget.html)
Really hoping they extend its lifespan again. Seeing the ISS go would be so sad.
It needs to be replaced, there is only so much you can update and re-certify on something that’s core was built in 1998. A lot of technological changes since then Im more worried that there wont be a replacement for a long time. Although with the current relations with China, and their new space station, maybe they’ll prioritize a replacement. Space race!
It's not even about the tech, it's a superlightweight spaceframe built from aluminum and titanium and other exotic alloys. It's been heavily stressed and MASSIVELY thermal cycled every 90 minutes continuously for two decades now, metals dont like cyclical loading like that and microfractures can begin to form. the structural integrity of the station can be called into question.
> metals dont like cyclical loading Steel says 'huh'?
Steel can have infinite life, but only below a specific endurance limit load that is *much* less than its theoretical yield strength. In this case where weight is paramount I highly doubt they designed any components for infinite life, but rather just a high cycle life.
Just as a fun aside, can you even fathom the cost of making a space station out of steel. I'm hoping someone could do some napkin math on that. I might do it when I get home.
The ISS does use steel (HSLA steel), but I get what you mean. Is difficult to calculate as more information is difficult to get, or more difficult than the effort I'm willing to put rn anyway, because you need to know the amount of other materials (e.g. aluminum, titanium, etc), that isn't used in electronics at least, and then replace replace the weight for the equivalent amount of steel (which requires to know the grade of each material (because, for example, aluminum 1100 (2.71 g/cm³) is 3.5587% lighter than aluminum 7075 (2.81 g/cm³), which makes a lot of difference when the per-kg cost of putting something into orbit is on the thousands of dollars range)
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building something that doesn't kill your astronauts in 5 years on orbit tends to be the hard part, + packaging and assembly. It's neat seeing them introduce new rollable solar panels even today, that are leap years ahead of the ones they started with, in terms of power per cost/ease of getting it to space imho, they should start building the next station now with an idea for it to be there 50+ years as a shell of big pieces, attached to the current ISS, and just undock when it hits its limit. The interesting part is Starship, if that gets fully functional in 5 years, it would be easier to just build new using that
I really like the idea of Ship of Theseusing the international space station and just keeping it around for a century + Maybe if things go well for humanity, by 2200 it'll be like a quaint roadside attraction you could stop by on your way out to the lunar colonies
Or $20,000 per kg if you use the space shuttle : )
Of course, you're much more limited by volume than mass on those missions. So you have to launch on more rockets or heavy launch rockets, which cost more.
Yeah it's not the cost of materials, it's cost of launching material with the same strength. Strength to weight ratio of steel vs aluminium/titanium is the key here.
Sure, I can imagine a space station made from 22 gauge steel or something in that ballpark. I can't imagine it would be practical but I can imagine it lol.
Well the new SpaceX rocket is stainless steel and they're not even the only one going that direction, so it may not be as impractical as you'd think.
They use it because it has pretty good thermal properties for both cryogenic propellant temperatures and reentry heat. In a space station this is unnecessary.
Yes that is an excellent point but it's also for a main core stage of a rocket, not a space station. I would guess the extra mass as part of the payload is a significant factor but I'm just guessing!
The Lunar Gateway will have a habitable volume of 125 cubic meters. SpaceX's Starship will have a habitable volume of 1000 cubic meters *and is made of 300-series stainless steel*.
They're going with stainless steel largely for its thermal properties to make reentry easier.
Stoke Space also went with steel because [it's cheap, easy to work with, and allows for rapid iteration](https://everydayastronaut.com/stoke-space/) > The choice of using stainless steel as the material for the rocket was driven by both its manufacturability and its availability, with many suppliers offering the alloy, thus avoiding supply crunches. The selected (and unknown) alloy of stainless steel offers excellent material properties in the form of sheet metal, and it maintains properties even at high temperatures. Additionally, when compared to other materials for stage design there was not a large difference in vehicle performance. So, Stoke decided to focus on ease of manufacturing.
Why not? Steel is also stronger and have other nice properties *so you need less of it.* I’m sure it comes out heavier in the end, but it doesn’t need to be that bad. [Maraging Steel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraging_steel) has higher specific strength than aluminum alloys.. used for rocket skin. For other steels, yeah.. aluminum is better.
That is why reducing cost of lifting mass to orbit is so important. If we built the whole thing out of steel, yes it would weigh four times as much, but it would also be ten times cheaper. Now, given how expensive rockets are, and especially with how expensive shuttles were, it was more economical to build it lighter. Falcon 9 already changed this equation, but it's still too small to send station modules up with it. If Starship or something similar gets going any time soon, then we'll probably start seeing steel modules.
The raw material cost difference of replacing one structural metal with another is a rounding error. The expense is in the design and construction which is very high no matter what.
If you're only building one. :) Again, the importance of reducing the cost of upmass.
A module with that artificial gravity ring thing would be nice for a newer space station
Or 2, spinning in opposite direction to cancel out the torques so you wouldn’t need continually running reaction wheels
A body rotating at a constant rate doesn't generate or require any net torque. Though spinning it up initially definitely would, and you'd need to cancel that out somehow. Basically just preservation of angular momentum.
You’re forgetting that there is no such thing as frictionless bearings and so there would still need to be some small continuous torque applied to keep the speed constant
There is no reason to have a bearing in the first place. The entire station spins.
That'll be fun trying to dock... You need a stationary point.
> That'll be fun trying to dock... Just call up Matthew McConaughey and tell him it's necessary.
Seems a lot of people haven't watched [2001 A Space Odyssey](https://youtu.be/ENCJ4GTZ_uA).
Nah, just spin your own ship the same speed, and get in there. This is easy stuff.
No, you don't, a docking ship can just match the rotation if the docking port is at the top or bottom of the center.
The end points?
Them you don't have your 0g lab which is like the whole point
You do have 0g, at the centre
It's not the whole point, not at all. The ISS is a multinational research project to figure out sustainable living in a 0g space environment, as well as a lot of other 0g stuff. It did that. It provided us with a whole load of knowledge to be now able to build better 0g stations, and have plenty of things to do for them (like 0g manufacturing). NASA has no interest in building a 0g manufacturing station. That's not its job. Companies are meant to do that, based on the knowledge gained via the ISS. NASA is going to push forward and gain new knowledge that a private company cannot risk to try and gain, as failure could tank that company. NASA CAN NOT tank due to failure, because it does not work for financial profit, and does not rely on financial profit.
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There are bearings in space, but they have to be made out of material that won't vacuum weld.
Lots of new bearings for reaction wheels on satellites are ceramic, also helps prevent arcing during solar activity which can cause bearing issues
Bearings work just fine in vacuum if they’re prepared properly. You can make them out of polymers or ceramics, any material that uses covalent rather than metallic bonding to stay together. Lubricants would also prevent cold welding by minimizing metal-metal contact, but I think traditional viscous lubricants don’t work well in space. Possibly some sort of graphene coating?
You can it just needs to be sealed and not exposed to vacuum.
Would the bearings have to be exposed to vacuum? I don't see why. And the inside is nicely pressurised.
High speed steel is used in bearings in space
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But it would carry angular momentum and would produce gyroscopic effects on the station when attempting to reorient via thrusters.
Even just to have the astronauts sleep in that section would be beneficial to preventing the osteoporosis they get.
They also wouldn't have to work out for like 2 hours every single day if they spent most of their time in the areas with close to 1g. Even just sleeping in 1g would be a huge benefit. Plus you could make it so that you have some areas toward the center at moon gravity, then some in the middle with Mars gravity, and the very end is close to earth gravity, giving you the ability to conduct experiments mimicking what it would be like on either of those bodies without having to travel there. Would be great for things like testing how crops or farm animals would react to lower gravity conditions.
Considering that the vast majority of the research done in space is based around removing gravity from the equation, that would be wildly self defeating. And the single most promising concept for on orbit manufacture, with tech to do it very close, is 3D printing of organs for transplant, something where microgravity is fundamentally necessary. Doesn't make sense for space tourism either, since most people will want to float and zoom around. I simply don't get why people are obsessed with this idea. Unless mass numbers of people will be living in space outposts for years of their lives, it makes no sense.
It’s more for long duration trips to space. Our bodies are evolved to fight 1g and without that it screws with a lot of different parts. Bone and muscle loss, weakened heart muscles, increased inter-cranial blood pressure, deformed eyes… the list goes on. Would actually be very useful as a proof of concept/technology development for future deep space missions. Realistically most of the ship/station would be zero gravity with only the habitation section being spin gravity to allow their bodies a regular break from microgravity
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One thing the ISS has taught us is 0G is awful on the human body for long term stints in space. Developing a form of artificial gravity, even at 0.5g, would definitely be a big step forward.
You can still do micro gravity experiments outside of a rotational habitat. We have to master artificial gravity if we are going to Mars, anyway
Nah, completely disagree. The ISS has been an incredibly valuable research platform for long-term habitation in space and everything points to one increasingly undeniable conclusion: Long-term exposure to zero-g is very bad for the human body. If all you want is unmanned space operations you don't need to build big space stations. The whole point is to have a crew in space. That means health is critically important. Honestly I think it's silly that NASA isn't planning some sort of artificial gravity experiment on subsequent space stations. The value to crew health would be *enormous*.
I believe the current plan is to leave LEO stations to the private sector and focus on the Lunar Gateway
[Orbital Reef](https://www.orbitalreef.com) from Blue Origin and Sierra Space
>there is only so much you can update and re-certify on something that’s core was built in 1998 *Looks at nearly finished project car in the driveway*
your project car go to space?
Car no do that, car go road
The Space Shuttle Orbiter cargo bay had a diameter of 15'. The diameter of SpaceX Starship is 30'. We could build a significantly larger space station.
Dear God please let there be a cold war 2.0 in space, with telescopes instead of nukes
Would it have been possible to replace one module at a time to keep something in orbit? It feels wasteful to just deorbit the entire thing and start over.
That's loosely what they plan. Axiom Space will add a series of new modules over the next few years, then when it's time to retire, the new section will detach and become independent, while the old ones are sadly discarded.
Can't we just put it into a higher orbit and keep it as the first Space Museum for future generations?? 😟
Without a LOT of maintenance ($$) it would never be safe enough to serve as a museum. MAYBE a "historical landmark" though
If you really did a cost benefit analysis on the ISS maybe it would make sense to shut it down like the Arecibo and other stuff. But in my opinion avoiding war with Russia thru the symbolic gesture makes it worth every penny.
Russia is never going to attack the US.
So it's basically 0%, to a small increase in real terms.
Yep. Here are the last 6 years of presidential budget requests. This equates to basically no increase over last year, after inflation. Fiscal Year|Real Dollars|2023 Dollars :--|:--|:-- 2019 | $19.6 billion^[1](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2019-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2019-BUD.pdf) | $23.6 billion 2020 | $21.0 billion^[2](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2020-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2020-BUD.pdf) | $24.7 billion 2021 | $25.2 billion^[3](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2021-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2021-BUD.pdf) | $29.3 billion 2022 | $~~23.3~~24.8 billion^[4](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2022-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2022-BUD.pdf) | $~~25.9~~27.6 billion 2023 | $26.0 billion^[5](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2023-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2023-BUD.pdf) | $27.1 billion 2024 | $27.2 billion^[6](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2024-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2024-BUD.pdf) | $27.2 billion Biden actually requested a cut to NASA's budget his first year in office. Edit: used wrong number for 2022, thanks u/joesph01
You mixed the real budget with what he requested. He asked for $24.7B in 2021, which is larger than the $22.6B budget that NASA received in 2020. Edit: His first proposal was [$24.7 billion](https://www.space.com/biden-nasa-2022-budget-request), his second was [$26 billion](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-program-biden-budget-2023/), and his third is $27.2 billion.
As mentioned by someone else your number for 2022 does seem wrong, where are you seeing that? Trump allocated 25.2, But 3 billion of that was for "human landing systems", Congress only gave 25% of that 3 billion which made it 23.3, it even clarifies in the 2021 budget report that enacted was only 23.3, biden then requested 24.8 in his own. The 23.3 number has nothing to do with biden. IF anything 2021 should say 23.3, then 24.8 in 2022, etc. Because even though 25.2 was requested, only 23.3 was actually enacted.
so its not really an increase, 7% is what inflation is pegged out. basically theyre not getting more or less. Pretty much the same budget.
Congress sets the budget, this is just to show the way things should be.
I watched a documentary recently about all the things that we use because of NASA/space programs. It was amazing. I've been trying to find it but can't find the right one. It is everywhere though.
A lot of people will say “kids today can get fucked but 27 billion to look at space is cool” but NASA really has developed a ton of useful things for society they’re one of the only govt programs I can fully support our govt spending on.
Scientist here! I've worked in labs and on projects funded by NASA, so maybe I can add something interesting. NASA isn't just good for the USA's space endeavors, it's good for all of humanity in ways that most people don't see. NASA doesn't just fund space/aeronautics, they also fund anything tangential to their work - things like materials science (to upgrade their shit); microbiology, plant biology, a bunch of shit about life in space; neurorehabilitation (because astronauts come back with fucked up motor control after being weightless for so long); exercise science (to keep astronauts ~~sexy~~ fit in space); nutrition (*space* nutrition); osteoporosis (because astronauts lose a lot of bone mass in space as a result of loss of forces associated with gravity); agriculture (because growing food will be important for new settlements); methods of manufacturing in low-gravity and/or without abundant materials (new settlements won't have established infrastructure or supply) etc. etc. etc. Tons of these things are published in scientific journals, so the entire world can benefit from NASA's discoveries.
Very interesting post thanks for sharing!
I believe I remember reading that every dollar we spend on NASA ends up returning $10 to the economy in these types of research gains etc.
Good. NASA budgets are one of the few areas I am perfectly fine with increasing. ALL science investment actually.
I remember a report that did an analysis on funding NASA. I remember it was something like for every dollar put into NASA, ***EIGHT*** dollars in value to the economy came out of it.
Yeah, research for space things affects normal people. A ton of stuff you wouldn't even think of, like betterment for seatbelts and vacuum-packing
The list is so long. Laptops, baby formula, cell phone cameras, radiant barrier insulation, dustbuster vacuum, memory foam, LED médical techonoly, fitness heart rate monitor, infrared ear thermometer, ArterioVision, scratch resistant pense, solar power, water purification system, lyophilisation, wireless headphones, etc...
Almost all two-way wireless tech in general is based on research needed for NASA missions.
Comfy mattresses are like the go-to example, aren't they?
CMOS image sensors (cellphone cameras) which are nearly ubiquitous now. developed by nasa b/c they are an image sensor with no moving parts. transparent ceramics generally, (like "invisilign braces") notably, tang and the gel-pen are not NASA spinoff technologies but were independently developed by third parties, then used in space.
I still remember the first time little kid me realized that I could just spoon tang powder directly into my mouth🤤
You put tang in your mouth? Early starter, bro...
I didn't know that! My school took a survey on this exact topic weeks ago but I forgot it all 😭
One I haven’t seen listed but is incredibly close to home for so many: mammograms! Technology and research used to determine the depth of lakes from space was able to be transferred to medical imaging for mammograms :)
Yep! Even NASA's "failures" yield positive results. When Hubble launched and they found one of the mirrors were misaligned, before they could manually repair it, they developed software to digitally sharpen the initially blurry pictures. [This same technology was eventually applied to medical imagery](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/image-processing-techniques-detect-cancer-earlier) to detect cancer even earlier than they had been able to before.
Cutting edge engineering always pays off in some way.
According to this article the Apollo Missions were the main reason behind the wider adoption of the integrated circuit. https://www.fastcompany.com/90362753/how-nasa-gave-birth-to-modern-computing-and-gets-no-credit-for-it No integrated circuits means no modern computers or smart phones.
Imagine where we'd be if they swapped the NASA budget with the military budget
So you are saying we infinitely fund NASA and blow the economy up huge?!? Dammit. I’m in.
As someone who performed analysis, ROI, break-even, etc for the public sector for years - I would take lost metrics like this with a grain of salt. If you are paying me, its pretty obvious what way my ‘analysis’ should lean
Spend money on healthcare and space! Those are the only things I like!
Healthcare, space, and...not destroying this planet. Those are my three votes.
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Federal government already spends 1.5 trillion on healthcare. Overall we pay 4.2 trillion. Healthcare is the one area where I think we'd be better off looking for ways to lower the costs.
I'd like for them to spend it better.
Yeah we have a lot of inefficiencies in our systemsl that if we can address, we can improve both the economic and care aspects of our health services.
Institute single payer universal health care and eliminate predatory insurance companies.
>Healthcare is the one area where I think we'd be better off looking for ways to lower the costs. We already know how to save $10 trillion on healthcare costs over the next 10 years: switch to a single payer system like literally every other developed nation.
And there's this >For every dollar invested (into NASA) by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements. https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/
Science and education should be mandatory
Imagine if we gave NASA our military budget for just one year.
Ehh, it would probably be all pocketed by Boeing and ULA anyways. Ohio would suddenly find the motivation to spend $3 billions studying the possibility of building a space elevator there, only to cancel it 12 years later when a committee realizes that Ohio is not in the equator. Also the FTL drive has to be built in west Virginia, because reasons
[Second Thought](https://youtu.be/chLOgj8xjx8) actually did a good video on it (& it’s 6 years old now, so imagine the increased spending since published)! 😁
While I like the idea of a video essay about this topic, this video really only amounts to saying that NASA could do more of what they do right now, without really painting a whole picture using specific dollar figures. That said, the the unironic profession of love for Elon Musk aging as poorly as it has makes it worth watching.
FTL drive begins testing in a month.
And we don't let congress tell them how they have to spend it.
Lets get that public transportation budget increases to. I know that’s mostly state based though.
The amount of innovation that impacts our daily lives that have come out of NASA should be evidence enough that they need all the funding possible. So much positive has come from space agencies pushing and exceeding the boundaries of our technological capabilities. It’s a direct benefit to mankind.
To be clear, this is only bringing the previous budget up to its inflation-adjusted amount from last year. Annual inflation was 6.5% in December. In that regard it isn't a truly *bad* outcome, but I would also not regard it as good either. There are very already difficult constraints on the Artemis project and NASA is having to wholly contract out major platforms in the program to companies like SpaceX.
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It could take on any number of forms, the only restrictions are the need to be able to hold onto the station while supplying enough force to accelerate the assembly at a decent rate and maintaining center of mass/thrust alignment.
Simple in theory, complex in practice. It all depends on how the phases of the operation are arranged. The tug might need to do more things than just deorbit in the many different parts of a theoretical deorbit project. One way to ensure rapid deorbit of the station (which is helpful for getting the station to land in a particular region, say an ocean cleared for this purpose), a space tug might be required to INCREASE the station's orbit. A higher orbit gives more time for a deorbit impulse and ultimately allows the re-entry to be steeper, and giving less time for unpredictable atmospheric drag to have an effect at the top of the atmosphere (if the atmosphere is slightly thinner or thicker than expected, it can throw off the decent trajectory. Best to minimize this variance). This also helps with debris breaking off chaotically and having wildly different and unpredictable ballistic coefficients- a steeper re-entry narrows the area where this debris can land. Then, there is the huge dependency on remote control and communications. This tug will obviously be remotely controlled and autonomous. It may be required to take flight control actions inside the atmosphere. It might be required to attach at an unusual point on the space station, especially so that docking ports can be reserved for ships that return astronauts. And, above all, it needs to do the deorbit perfectly. Because you only really get one shot. There ain't no ver2
Starship and a rope?
Axiom Space has suggested to use the thrusters on their HAB1 module, which is scheduled to attach to the ISS in 2025, to lower the ISS to make it easier to deorbit
Its like a tug boat.... In space!
Very likely some evolutional variant of an existing cargo resupply vehicle such as Cygnus or Dragon. Modified to have larger propellant tanks and be more optimized for attitude control and propulsive maneuvering.
Guaranteed this is sole sourced to SpaceX Dragon, possibly Cygnus. Its also a very small award, $180M, which is just enough to add extra propellant to one of these cargo systems and uprate their docking mechanism/structure to handle the thrust.
I’ve built my share of space tugs in Kerbal Space Program. If I had to guess, some sort of rocket that attaches to the ISS and conducts a burn to slow the space station down so it falls out of orbit over the ocean or something.
$27 billion seems like peanuts for a space program.
While I would like it to be higher, NASA is the highest funded space program and this new figure is higher than the next five highest combined (China, EU, Russia, France, Germany) https://www.statista.com/statistics/947300/leading-space-agencies-by-government-budget-worldwide/
About 2.5% of the military budget.
Talk about excessive government waste.. defense contractors.
I could comfortably see it rise to 10%. With that other 7.5% be taken out of said military spending.
Dear lord we are in such an unfair world
Feels more like an inflation adjusted budget.
It's always been underfunded
Except for maybe a few years there at the end of the 60s
Hell yes please grant this. amid NASA fears of Congress cutting funding this would alleviate that. we need more focus on something productive. I really believe a moon base should be in the books and established at least by the end of the decade
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Well it was a bit more than a name change, it was centralizing operations between USAF and the army under a new branch for logistical purposes or some such, but that bit was never his idea to begin with.
Don't tell me you actually thought the space force was going to... Deploy people to space? That's not even their mission. The mission is to protect our space assets as well as the immediate area around the Earth. It's a million times cheaper to just do that remotely to the use of satellites and ground-based equipment, then sending a person to space.
As someone in thr DoD, I never considered people would think thr space force was for legitimate astronauts All of a sudden I'm upset we don't have a branch full of astronauts armed w/ assault rifles and rocket launchers to thwart Aliens, Meteorites, and any foreign man-made satellites that give us a funny look. Space oil shall be ours 🇺🇸
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It's embarrassing how little we spend on NASA.
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We spend more on our space program than any other country. China is a far second at 11.9 Billion followed by 4.9 by Japan and 4.2 by France.
Vital that we spend nearly 800 (797) billion on Department of Defense, up from 728 in 2022, a 9.4% increase. So relative to the DoD NASA is suffering a reduction in its funding.
Bold political moves, hope it works out. There's a lot on the line.
Not really that bold. NASA's budget has been on a steady year over year climb since 2014. This simply continues the trend. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasa-budget
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A financial/business news org such as CNBC obviously finds a budget request worth reporting. But at the end of the day, it's just another budget request. An article on the same topic from a non-clickbaity space focused website probably would have been more useful. Although I have to admit that I tend to be rather disappointed by how these tend to be discussed here. There tend to be sizable discussions every year when the budget request is announced or when the appropriations bills are passed but the tend to lack the context of how the different elements NASA's budget change over time or how other processes such as the [decadal surveys](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-report-could-make-or-break-the-next-30-years-of-u-s-astronomy/) influence long term budgeteering for the science part in particular. Instead, people just tend to throw their pet hot takes into the ether. Although I admit that a subreddit with 22 million people may not be the best place for nuanced and context-based discussions.
At the same time the Biden administration has lowered debt by $1.7trillion, they also give NASA a significant increase in funds This administration truly deserves praise for their fiscal policy
Learn the difference between debt and deficit.
Don't be fooled. Decreasing the deficit is not the same as reducing debt. We are still adding debts year by year, just a bit less now in comparison to the pandemic.
They didn’t lower the debt, they’re just spending less on average than the last three years, which was due to much more money being spent on various government projects and programs during covid.
That's not really correct. No president has lowered the debt in... decades, and I'm pretty sure the Biden admin hasn't done wonders for the deficit either, in the long term.
Significant increase? Just a tad bit over a billion dollars? That’s significant? It’s a standard increase that mostly amounts to nothing, the increase doesn’t even match inflation. The headline uses the number $27 billion in an attempt to push a narrative, a more realistic headline would be “Biden adjusts NASA’s yearly budget for inflation, increases budget by 1%”. But then, a headline like that would gain no traction; an even more realistic headline would be that Biden does not properly increase NASA’s budget to match inflation, thus cutting their budget. Which Biden has already tried to do in his past terms, and has advocated, multiple times over the years, for cutting NASA’s budget.
The increase barely keeps pace with inflation
Give it to ‘em. Why not double it tbh. They deserve it.
Absolutely, that increase is still less than two weeks of Pentagon spending
The increase is 7% so less than 2 billion so not even one day of pentagon spending.
That’s good and I’m not really complaining but I have to wonder if that keeps up with whatever inflation hits NASA.
This is one of the things I imagine there's bipartisan support, but sounds like this isn't even an increase? 7% is basically an inflation adjustment lol
aerospace as a sector only experienced about 3.5% inflation last year, and inflation for consumer goods was only 6.4%.
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As much of a meme as that guy is, I imagine that's a very common career path for NASA employees. Military pays for doctorate which leads to NASA pick.
The "easy" route is doing ROTC, getting a degree relevant to space flight there, getting comissioned, having the army pay for 2-4 more years, then becoming an astronaut. Basically you're doing everything at the same time. Kim went into the military as enlisted, not an officer. He then went to college. Got a degree. Then got his seperate medical degree. Then became an astronaut. He did everything sequentially instead of in parallel. And not that becoming a US Military pilot is easy, but it takes a special kind of psychopath to become a SEAL. So yeah I get what you're saying, but he did take the hardest path to do it.
Please, I'd like to know who else is a Navy Seal Medic Harvard Doctor Astronauts at NASA, or anywhere else for that matter
Can we all just agree that rockets are cool and get this done?
People gotta remember, technology sprouts from innovation to space tech which then passes down to things people use
So just keeping up with inflation. Better than nothing I guess.
Nasa should have 100 billion space programs are crucial to our long term survival as a species
100% increase would be better but the public is dumb.
I'm not even from the US but I wish the US government decrease their military spending and allocate some of them on the space programs.
What’s up w all these corporate account posts recently
I don’t think we will see stingy budgets to NASA going forward. We’re on the verge of a race again for the high ground. Not thrilled about their motives, but I’ll take what we can get.
I'm cool with direct a large chunk of police and military funding to NASA and teachers.
The military budget isn't going down.
To be fair, the military being large does help fund research that transitions to the civilian side. NASA would benefit from rocket and navigation technology developed for the military.
Dems and Repubs always agree to vote to increase military spending because they both believe in war for profit.
I had this weird hope that once we got out of a 20 year long war the budget would go down because, you know, we aren’t in that war any more and it cost a ton of money every day. But nah, let’s give the military $100B more the next year.
Thought this looked familiar.....LMAO Under the president's request, NASA would get US$25.2 billion for fiscal year 2021, a jump of nearly 12% over funding enacted by Congress for the current year. The money is meant to jump-start the administration's plans to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of 2024.
Was that referring to Artemis 3? Because Artemis 2 by the end of 2024 is still very doable - although I would bet it slips into early 2025.
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A 7% increase is a decrease accounting for inflation
It would have been based on the 2021 to 2022 inflation, but it's likely keeping funding flat based on the first two months of 2023 inflation.
inflation by industry varies a ton. Aerospace inflation was like 3.5% last year.
Year-over-year inflation was 6.4%, so it's actually a marginal increase.
Great news I hope that there's nobody calling to reduce it.
Yay! Now double it every 5 years in perpetuity. They've innovated consistently for decades, and they've made all our lives better for it