NASA was founded in 1959 by an active congress.

President Eisenhower founded NASA as a civilian space agency as a rebuttal

to the tendency toward Cold War tensions and the militarization of space.

So the United States has always have a civilian space agency

dictating that its mission be towards exploration and

scientific knowledge rather than militarization.

However, NASA existed in a situation of the Cold War, and

the early part of the space activity was driven by geopolitical considerations and

our rivalry with the Soviet Union.

At the core of what NASA does in space is the Launch Capability.

There is no rocket until recently that it succeeded the enormous capabilities of

the Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon and

led to the Apollo program.

To launch astronauts and

payloads larger than a couple of tons, a new heavy lift capability is required.

And the United States has been struggling to fund this activity through NASA.

As a result of NASA's funding and technical difficulties,

space exploration has been on a relatively slow track over the last few decades.

And currently it's not possible to put astronauts into space.

We have to rely on the Russians and the Soyuz Spacecraft.

Within NASA the budget is of course, divided into several categories.

There is Exploration, which involves human exploration and unmanned or

robotic spacecraft traveling through the solar system.

There's also research on Launch Capabilities, Rocketry and Propulsion.

NASA has a growing part of its research enterprise devoted to looking at the Earth

and understanding the ways that the Earth is changing and

managing the Earth's resources.

But uncertainties in funding have caused the timeline of many favorite projects

among scientists to be extended and some projects have even being canceled.

Many of most ambitious projects in Astronomy and Space Science and

Planetary Exploration now have to be collaborative.

With prize tags exceeding a billion dollars, it makes sense to collaborate.

NASA's counterpart, European Space Agency, has a zone substantial capabilities.

For example, ESA, is a partner in hobble space telescope, and

will be a partner in James Webb Space Telescope.

ESA also has its own planetary missions and astronomy missions.

This cooperation, with a little bit of rivalry, is a healthy situation and

has allowed some missions to happen which would not have happened

just depending on NASA.

There's also collaboration between the Americans, the Europeans and

the Japanese space agency.

Not so much with the Chinese who have a growing space activity.

The growing complexity and price tags, especially of planetary science and

astronomy missions has led to the problem of new starts.

NASA's budget is essentially static and has been so for a decade,

which means that the number of new missions on new starts is declining and

has been for ten or 15 years.

As the budgets go up and a mission takes roughly a decade to plan and

execute, this squeeze is limiting the amount of science that NASA can do.

If we look at the history of NASA's budget over its entire span,

we can see that the 60s when the Apollo missions were launched was an anomaly.

NASA's budget ramped up rapidly by a factor of ten to an almost unsustainable

level, amounting to 5% of the federal budget at that time.

Since then it declined.

The last three Apollo missions were actually cancelled.

And NASA's budget in real terms has been pretty static for the last 15 years.

As a fraction of the Federal budget,

NASA's budget has migrated down to 1% and even less.

It is a relatively small amount of Federal money

corresponding to about one taxpayer dollar per year.

meanwhile opinion polls show that public support for NASA is relatively strong.

The general public like the idea of space travel and space exploration.

And the discoveries of astronomy that result from things like

the Hubble Space Telescope.

However they're not necessarily willing to pay it.

Of course it turns out that the public when asked what fraction of the Federal

budget NASA occupies almost always overestimate this by significant factor.

Since it's inception, NASA has always been a civilian space agency.

And militarization of space is something that all countries try to guard against.

NASA's current budget is about $18.5 billion,

which sounds like a lot of money but is actually insufficient for NASA to execute

it's best ideas, giving the increasing cost and complexity of space missions.

Since it's peak during the Apollo era

NASA's proportion of the Federal budget has declined strongly.

And more recently slowly from about 1% down to about 0.5% of the Federal budget.

Despite this public support of this space enterprise remains strong.

15. The Role of NASA

Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space

Meet the Instructors