NASA Budget

Each year, the United States Congress passes a Federal Budget detailing where federal tax money will be spent in the coming fiscal year. The following charts detail the amount of federal funding allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) each year over its past fifty year history (1958-2008) to operate aeronautics research, unmanned planetary and manned space exploration programs. As seen in the year-by-year breakdown li... more

Each year, the United States Congress passes a Federal Budget detailing where federal tax money will be spent in the coming fiscal year. The following charts detail the amount of federal funding allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) each year over its past fifty year history (1958-2008) to operate aeronautics research, unmanned planetary and manned space exploration programs. As seen in the year-by-year breakdown listed below, the total amounts (in nominal dollars) that NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2008 amounts to $416 billion dollars—an average of $8.17 billion per year. By way of comparison, total spending over this period by the National Science Foundation was roughly one-fourth of NASA's expenditures: 101.5 billion, or $2.00 billion a year. According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (Meaning: if the value of $1.00 at today's rate equaled the value of $1.00 in 1958), the figure is ... less