Budget of NASA

As a federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) receives its funding from the annual federal budget passed by the United States Congress. The following charts detail the amount of federal funding allotted to NASA each year over its past fifty-year history (1958–2009) to operate aeronautics research, unmanned and manned space exploration programs.

Annual budget, 1958-2015
Seen in the year-by-year breakdown listed below, the total amounts (in nominal dollars) that NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2011 amounts to $526.178 billion—an average of $9.928 billion per year. By way of comparison, total spending over this period by the National Science Foundation was roughly one-fifth of NASA's expenditures: $101.5 billion, or $2 billion a year. NASA's FY 2011 budget of $18.4 billion represented about 0.5% of the $3.4 trillion United States federal budget during that year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.

According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion per year over its fifty-year history.

Notes for table: Sources for a part of these data: U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (needs proper citation-link, numbers here differ from NASA Pocket Statistics), Air Force Association's Air Force Magazine 2007 Space Almanac

Secondary references:

NASA employment
Reference:

1. Years 1960-1968

2. Years 1969-1978

3. Years 1979-1988

4. CS, Years 1993-1995

5. Year 2012

6. CS, Year 1959-1968, 1989-1996, NASA Pocket Stats: http://history.nasa.gov/pocketstats/sect%20D/CS%20Trend.pdf

7. CS, Year 1993-2011, Workforce Information Cubes: https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov

8. Contractors, 1969: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4102/ch5.htm

Cost of Apollo program


NASA's budget peaked in 1964-66, when it consumed roughly 4% of federal spending. The agency was building up to the first moon landing; the Apollo program involved more than 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors.

In March 1966, NASA officials told Congress that the 1959-72 "run-out cost" of the Apollo program would be an estimated $22.718 billion. The total cost turned out to be between $20 and $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars (about $136 billion in 2007 dollars).

The costs of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rockets came to about $83 billion in 2005 dollars. Apollo spacecraft cost $28 billion, including the Command/Service Module, $17 billion; Lunar Module, $11 billion; and launch vehicles (Saturn I, Saturn IB, Saturn V cost about $46 billion in 2005 dollars).

Economic impact of NASA funding
A November 1971 study of NASA released by MRIGlobal (formerly Midwest Research Institute) of Kansas City, Missouri ("Technological Progress and Commercialization of Communications Satellites." In: "Economic Impact of Stimulated Technological Activity") concluded that "the $25 billion in 1958 dollars spent on civilian space R & D during the 1958-1969 period has returned $52 billion through 1971 -- and will continue to produce pay offs through 1987, at which time the total pay off will have been $181 billion. The discounted rate of return for this investment will have been 33 percent."



A 1992 commentary in the British science journal Nature reported:

"'The economic benefits of NASA's programs are greater than generally realized. The main beneficiaries (the American public) may not even realize the source of their good fortune. . .'"

Other statistics on NASA's economic impact may be found in the 1976 Chase Econometrics Associates, Inc. reports and backed by the 1989 Chapman Research report, which examined 259 non-space applications of NASA technology during an eight-year period (1976–1984) and found more than:
 * $21.6 billion in sales and benefits
 * 352,000 (mostly skilled) jobs created or saved
 * $355 million in federal corporate income taxes

According to the "Nature" commentary, these 259 applications represent ". . .only 1% of an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 Space program spin-offs."

In 2014, the American Helicopter Society criticized NASA and the government for reducing the annual rotorcraft budget from $50 million in 2000 to $23 million in 2013, impacting commercial opportunities.

Public perception
The perceived national security threat posed by early Soviet leads in spaceflight drove NASA's budget to its peak, both in real inflation-adjusted dollars and in percentage of total federal budget (4.41% in 1966). But the U.S. victory in the Space Race &mdash; landing men on the Moon &mdash; erased the perceived threat, and NASA was unable to sustain political support for its vision of an even more ambitious Space Transportation System entailing reusable Earth-to-orbit shuttles, a permanent space station, lunar bases, and a manned mission to Mars. Only a scaled-back Space Shuttle was approved, and NASA's funding leveled off at just under 1% in 1976, then declined to 0.75% in 1986. After a brief increase to 1.01% in 1992, it declined to about 0.49% in 2013.

The American public, on average, believes NASA's budget has a much larger share of the federal budget than it actually does. A 1997 poll reported that Americans had an average estimate of 20% for NASA's share of the federal budget, far higher than the actual 0.5% to under 1% that has been maintained throughout the late '90s and first decade of the 2000s. It is estimated that most Americans spent less than $9 on NASA through personal income tax in 2009.

However, there has been a recent movement to communicate discrepancy between perception and reality of NASA's budget as well as lobbying to return the funding back to the 1970-1990 level. The United States Senate Science Committee met in March 2012 where astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that "Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow." Inspired by Tyson's advocacy and remarks, the Penny4NASA campaign was initiated in 2012 by John Zeller and advocates the doubling of NASA's budget to one percent of the Federal Budget, or one "penny on the dollar."

To help with public perception and to raise awareness regarding the widespread benefits of NASA-funded programs and technologies, NASA instituted the Spinoffs publication. This was a direct offshoot of the Technology Utilization Program Report, a "publication dedicated to informing the scientific community about available NASA technologies, and ongoing requests received for supporting information." according to the NASA Spinoff about page the technologies in these reports created interest in the technology transfer concept, its successes, and its use as a public awareness tool. The reports generated such keen interest by the public that NASA decided to make them into an attractive publication. Thus, the first four-color edition of Spinoff was published in 1976.

Related legislation

 * 1961— Apollo mission funding PL 87-98 A
 * 1970— National Aeronautics and Space Administration Research and Development Act, PL 91-119
 * 1984— National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act, PL 98-361
 * 1988— National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act, PL 100-685
 * 2005— National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005, PL 109-155
 * 2010— National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010
 * 2014– (proposed) National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2014 (H.R. 4412; 113th Congress)