For Americans, National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has been a home-term since the '60s when it accomplished the seemingly impossible, carrying and landing humans on the Moon. Since then, NASA (National Aeronautics Space Agency) has revealed other alien-worlds like, Saturn's moon Titan and Mars, on top of NASA flew past every planet in our solar system.
It has achieved so much on a very small budget. What more could NASA have accomplished over the years? Just contemplate if we gave NASA hundreds of billions of dollars a year like what we use on the United States military.
The USA uses more budgets on space exploration than any other country in the world. NASA gets a huge amount of this investment, the country's main agency for space study.
But this small part of the budget that NASA gets is almost zero if compared to the complete US Federal budget. You will be stunned to know that after the Space Agency landed the first man on the Moon (1969), its budget has dropped from 4.5 percent of the Federal budget to less than 0.5 percent.
So let’s see if NASA’s budget hadn’t reduced? And what if, its investment was comparable to the US military’s?
For sure it’s impossible to know what precisely we could have reached, but here’s a look at what could have happened if US military’s budget was comparable to NASA’s in 2016.
Alternative way, the military’s financial plan for 2016 would pay for a crewed operation to Mars with 10s of billions to spare. NASA guesses it would cost 450 billion dollars to take and land the first humans on Mars by the late 2030s or quick 2040s.
What else might the space agency do with 600 billion dollars? Let’s look at how NASA allotted its funds in 2016. That would simply meet present costs for NASA’s largest ongoing projects including:
Construction and launch budgets for the most dominant rocket in history, the Space Launch System (SLS).
The utmost powerful space telescope ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Partner with SpaceX on its first mission to Mars in 2018, the Red Dragon Mission (RGM).
Pay for NASA procedures on board the International Space Station (ISS) through 2024.
So, how would you have National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) spend the rest?
We can think of some thoughts.