Most people do not realize how much money does NASA get every year, especially in the current climate. Since it receives about billions of dollars every year from American taxpayers (in large part to support NASA and other space exploration), the amount of waste and abuse of funds that is used to support the space program far outweighs how much money is spent on NASA. At NASA there is a tremendous amount of waste because of poor management and misuse of funds by Congress, the administration and agency leadership. In fact, waste is so prevalent at NASA that it has actually become one of the most wasteful agencies in the United States.
In order to understand how much money does NASA get every year, you have to look no further than the President’s NASA budget. That is how much waste, mismanagement and wastefulness are prioritized and funded through this administration. Unfortunately, much of this waste comes from overspending and failure to properly plan and manage NASA and other space programs. Many politicians in both parties allow NASA to waste huge amounts of money with no plan to correct the problems, and often times they will increase NASA spending without providing any type of oversight or accountability.
It is impossible for NASA to find a way to put all the research money they receive back into the science projects that are essential to our space program. Even if a program is completely successful and puts NASA back on track, it still takes money to make that success happen. That means that NASA has to find ways to reduce its waste while continuing to operate many successful programs. For example, it costs NASA millions of tax dollars every year to launch one space shuttle, maintain the international space station, send astronauts to space, build more shuttle flights, and pay for a variety of space research programs. Without those expensive programs NASA would be toast.
How much money does NASA get every year? About 5 billion dollars, which is about 1.5% of the budget. At any given time, NASA gets a great portion of its total budget–about seventy percent. Anytime you see a NASA or space program commercial, or public financial announcement, that includes money for research, you are looking at a significant amount of money being spent.
Now, as you can imagine, there are many questions regarding how much money does NASA get each year and how can they properly use that money. For example, it is important to understand the differences between space research and earth science research. For example, NASA’s space research programs go to observe and study space weather patterns, which can help them better understand how we will go to space in the future. Earth science involves studying the ocean, the atmosphere, ice sheets, and various scientific aspects of our planet.
In fact, NASA spends about twenty percent of its total budget on space research, about ten percent on the space station, and another ten percent on robotic space exploration. If you add all of that up, you can quickly see how NASA uses its research money. A lot of that research is used to develop better ways to get people to space faster, to study how we might utilize space debris to mining resources, and how we might protect our astronauts from space-related dangers. It is all a part of how NASA does research.
The other area NASA studies is how to get people to Mars, and the moon. These are two of the biggest outer space targets, and if we get these things right, we could reach the moon in the next twenty years. We have very expensive technologies to help us reach those destinations, but NASA needs to study them thoroughly. They also need to find out how to get astronauts to those destinations safely. All of these areas will play a large part of how much money does NASA get every year.
One area NASA often gets asked about is how much money does NASA get for space research. There is actually a lot of funding for this. It is important for NASA to do research, because without it, we wouldn’t be able to reach the moon or go to space. Without space research, we couldn’t even go to the moon. That means if you were an astronaut, and you didn’t do some type of research, you wouldn’t get paid!