The current administration has essentially gutted NASA and slowed to a crawl any benefits from the scientific research the agency has accomplished over the years.

Before we all agree that we can't afford NASA, we should know how much space exploration really costs us.

NASA's annual budgets for the past fifty years have amount in total to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 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 billion a year. NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represented about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.

So before we conclude that we simply can't afford it, maybe we should compare how much we spend on NASA and what we benefit from those expenditures to other spending done by the government. Let's start with just a couple small examples...

• The largest annual budget for NASA amounts to only about 1% of what we've spent fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

• We spend more each year air-conditioning our facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan than the entire annual NASA budget.

• The cost of only one month of the war in Afghanistan is more than the entire annual NASA budget.

• We've already spent more than $11 billion building the Yucca Flats nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada. That's more than half the cost of an entire year of NASA's space program. And the Yucca Flats facility has never been used and will likely never be used because of political bickering.

So before we conclude that "we can't afford NASA and the space program", we should think about where else we're spending money and whether we think those expenditures have produced as much as NASA.