Jump to content

Talk:Budget of NASA

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Beland (talk | contribs) at 00:23, 20 November 2014 (→Economic impact dated stats: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Clean up

We need to go clean up this page and go back and check all the values because the more I check, the more that seems to be incorrect. --Craigboy (talk) 03:05, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We also need to change the constant dollar year to 2010, and possible look into only updating the constant dollar year every five years due to low activity on this page. --Craigboy (talk) 03:07, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm new to Wikipedia, but I have recently been doing some NASA budget research. I found a link to an Excel spreadsheet on the Office of Management and Budget web site that gives historic annual budget numbers for many agencies, including NASA:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/hist04z1.xls

Bruce in MN (talk) 15:39, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the page where I found the above link...

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals/

Bruce in MN (talk) 16:01, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also new to editing on the Wiki but I was doing research for a paper for class and I found an interesting discrepancy between the numbers provided by the OMB (and consequently by the World Almanac book that is the actual reference in the article) and NASA's own historical figures provided in the link below. I unfortunately don't have time now to investigate why this is, so I'll just leave this here for future reference.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/hqlibrary/documents/o45128943_1959_1979.pdf

The Romanian Jedi (talk) 23:37, 20 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

percentage of GDP

It would be useful to also have budget as percentage of US GDP because federal budget has changed over time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.136.121.96 (talk) 07:17, 13 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

GDP changes from year to year as well. Looking at this site http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/ could be a good start.
In 2007 it's .1%, In 1966 it's .7% —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.242.81.80 (talk) 02:08, 14 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have data on NASA budget as percentage of GDP for 1960 through today (and estimates through 2016). Also comparisons of NASA budget as percentage of Federal outlays compared to Department of Defense and Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. I think it's pretty interesting. As a reference, see http://www.space-pictures.com/view/pictures-of-planets/planet-mars/evidence-of-life-on-mars/manned-mission-to-mars.php. However, I am new and have not edited an article on Wiki and am a bit nervous about doing this. I've read some of the documentation and tried the Sandbox but am still a bit nervous. For example, I am not sure about the best way to size and load an image. Is there a way to get a coach to help make sure I do a quality job ? Jb2012a (talk) 03:48, 28 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So Wikipedia now Cites Itself?

Citation #11 is a citation of this very Wikipedia article. My head just about exploded when I saw it. --66.206.187.182 (talk) 21:31, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You are quite right; Wikipedia cannot use itself as a source, and this has been removed, along with the sentence it was used to cite. Thanks for catching it. JustinTime55 (talk) 17:41, 6 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification needed under "Economic impact of NASA funding"

As is, the quotation from the Midwest Research Institute seems to imply that the return on investment for civilian space R&D was 33% per year.
At this rate, however, a $25 billion investment in 1958 would have ballooned to $7.5 Trillion in only 20 years (and almost $100 Trillion by 1987).
Someone with access to the cited source should clarify exactly how the authors came up with that 33% figure because it's clearly NOT intended
to reflect an annually compounded ROI.

71.100.17.85 (talk) 09:07, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of data

On april 7, the table of actual funding data was removed from the article by an anonymous user with no reason given. If there's a problem with the article, shouldn't the proper response be to try and fix it? Even if something needs to go, I don't think an immediate gutting of the article with no discussion is the right route. Right now the article is completely useless, since it no longer has any information on its actual subject. Unless someone wants to justify this, I'm going to revert that edit after a few days. 68.43.60.195 (talk) 21:30, 19 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree and have reverted it. That's simply an inexcusable edit and I don't think it even deserved the generous grace period it's had. Fourpointsix (talk) 18:09, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

New Data

NASA released a new paper about it's budget on March 4, 2014: [[1]]. Because I can't edit the page as effectively as I want, it would be perfect if an experienced user adds this new information. Thank you. EmreOsm95 (talk) 16:22, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Image replacement

Using the data from this article, I created a new vectorized version of this chart:

Because we don't seem to have the projected federal numbers, I felt it would be WP:OR to try and recreate that section of the chart. I did, however, expand the span to be 1958-2012 rather than 1962-2014. A fairly faithful recreation of the original chart can be found here. However, since these data are really not well-represented using a line graph, I generated instead a bar graph, which looks much nicer:

I used Python and matplotlib to generate these images, so that they can be easily updated, either for stylistic reasons or when later budget reports are released. You can find the code in my userspace here. I'm not sure that's the best place for the code, long-term, but I don't see an easy way to attach image-generation scripts to images on commons. 0x0077BE [talk/contrib] 16:33, 30 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@JustinTime55: I notice in your most recent edit summary you suggest that the budget chart looks better on the right than on the left. I just moved it to the left because in its original form it seemed like it was on the right by default, and had no text-wrapping. That said, even with it inline wrapped on the right, I still think left might look a bit better, because the NASA insignia directly above it is also on the right. That said, when I make my browser window much wider, I find that it looks worse when the image is on the left. I'm fine either way. Let me know if a different version of this image would be better - I'm thinking part of the problem with placement may be that the text labels are rather small compared to the data, so maybe I could prepare a version of the image that has no axis labels or title, and we can arrange to have it link to the version with axis labels and the title when you click on it. 0x0077BE [talk/contrib] 21:41, 30 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think the image is fine the way it is. Its appearance must be dependent on the reader's equipment; yesterday on a different computer the axes and labels were looking light and hard to read, but that's not the case on the computer I'm using today (not perfect, but good enough to read.) I don't think you need to bother removing the labels; I think once users have been around a while they should know they can always just click on any image as necessary to see it in greater detail. 15:11, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Economic impact dated stats

The section on economic impact is dated, citing studies from the 1970s.

I'm sure others can find more info, but here are some links to start:

-- Beland (talk) 00:23, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Economic impact POV=

The economic impact section seems to be promoting the idea that NASA is well worth the economic investment in economic returns. This is a controversial claim. For example, the stats provided only claim $22.1B of benefit from 8 years of spending. It's unclear how or if these are inflation-adjusted, and it's unclear if this is just the amount NASA spent on stuff, or if this is solely the amount due to the multiplier effect. The real crux of the matter is whether or not the multiplier for NASA is greater than everything else we could be spending the billions of dollars on. I'm not taking a position on these questions, but this section needs to take in a wider diversity of viewpoints. Here are some examples not reflected in the article:

Pages that raise criticisms:

-- Beland (talk) 00:23, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Budget_of_NASA&oldid=634620392"