Sibling comment (dmd): > I saw a study a few years ago where people were asked how much funding various agencies get, and the majority of people thought NASA was more than 10% of the federal budget; some even went as high as 25%. (It's less than half of 1%.)
Your comment: > [NASA’s] $23 billion dollar budget is only 3% of the size of the DOD budget.
NASA’s budget is about half a percent of total DoD budget, but that doesn’t tell an accurate story. Most people assume NASA is synonymous with the total or almost total US space budget, but its less than half. You can do the math in 2022 if you would like [0], but in 2013 NASA’s budget was $16.8B [1], and the total space budget was $39.3B [2]. According to that article, in 2013 every other nation was supposedly under a $10B space budget [2], but can’t really speak to the validity of that. I think it’s reasonable to say we spend a decent amount on space compared to others. All that said, not opposed to an increased space budget, more space is good in my book.
[0] https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/which-countries-spend...