• Question: If the USA gave half of its military budget to fund NASA, what do you believe humans could achieve

    Asked by Rasik_npl to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 6 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I think it would be amazing! It would make such a massive amount of difference. NASA gets less than 0.5% of the federal budget. When it put a man on the moon it apparently had 4.5%. With more money, we’d see more missions and quicker progress, because there would be money for more activity.

      I think we would be able to achieve many of our current goals faster, for example more human space exploration.

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I’d be controversial here – I wouldn’t necessarily give it all to NASA. If Donald Trump gets his way next year, NASA’s planetary science budget will be $1.93 billion. Another organisation, called NOAA, has an Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric research; their budget for next year might be $0.4 billion. We know more about Mars or the Moon than we do the deep parts of our own oceans, and watching last night’s Blue Planet II episode about the deep ocean makes me think we could discover all sorts of amazing things if they had more money. We might discover the origins of life on Earth! We might find a way of harnessing all the power that’s down there! We could find all manner of amazing creatures, and realise just how much harm we’re causing to them. Seriously, watch the episode and have just imagine what we could do with that funding…
      Then again, given the US military budget is something like $6-700 billion a year, there’d probably be plenty for NASA and NOAA (and everyone else) to share!

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