Nasa's Budget And Its Effect On NASA

Receiving billions of dollars from the United States Government gave the space agency enough funds to build high tech machines and spacecrafts. Giving them the ability to explore the universe. After years and years of receiving around the same budget. What happens when a miniscule amount of that budget is taken away? Under the Trump Administration, NASA is expected to lose a very small portion of its budget from the previous year. Losing the small portion of about 0.8% of the previous year's budget will hurt NASA in some ways, but will help them in others. Meaning many NASA departments will be losing money, but some will be gaining money. The cut helps NASA focus in on more important missions, and throwing out the less important ones. The

The planetary division is expected to gain the most. Its budget would grow from $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion (Tollefson). This was after trump called for the agency to focus more on deep space exploration, which means to explore deeper into space, other than Earth-centric research, which is studying the earth and how it works. With the new budget for the planetary division, it is accelerating NASA’s plan to explore Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Not only will the boost in money for the planetary division help this single mission, but will help NASA explore more and more planets in the future. Things don’t look that bright for some of the other departments of NASA as the earth-science department will go from receiving $1.9 billion to $1.8 billion, and NASA’s education program, which has been shut down completely, was supposed to inspire the next generations of scientists and engineers (Khan). Some of the other projects being shut down are: JPL Orbiting Carbon Observatory, an instrument that detects how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, which was designed to monitor ocean health, The Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory Pathfinder, or CLARREO, whose solar spectrometer would have produced highly accurate climate projections (Khan). The trump administration

Losing this small portion of money will hurt NASA in some ways, but will help them in others. The cut helps NASA focus in on more important missions, and throwing out the less important ones. The last 10-20 years of space exploration have been very stagnant. The human race deserves to know more than we do, and Donald Trump cutting funding by 1% is making NASA key in on bigger missions, which gives the people hope of something major happening in the next few years. NASA, although they already lead the world in space exploration, another major successful mission would only set them further apart from the competition. In the beginning, this budget cut wasn’t looking to good for the space agency, and nobody will know if the cut ended up being a good thing or not until NASA either lands humans on mars, or they discover life elsewhere in our solar system. These are just some things a single human may never know, the world may never even