NASA Funding
NASA may have a lot of funding. However, missions take a very long time to even start working on.
October 19, 2016
Hello next President,
I understand that in the next 4 years of your presidency, you will be very busy working on this amazing country. However, I urge you to address a problem that many people are concerned about. That problem is with NASA’s missions. NASA currently has $18.5 billion in funding. To put that in perspective, the U.S. military in 2015 had $598.5 billion USD. That’s 54% of the budget we had for our nation at the time. Plus, the closest mission to outer space is in 2020 to redirect an enormous asteroid away from earth. In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, that is not at all soon enough. I purpose giving NASA more funding to increase the number of missions. We should send out more satellites more deep space probes, bigger and better telescopes, and even more radio signals.
It is ridiculous that there is not many missions of any kind any more. There was only a satellite going by ‘no longer a planet’ Pluto, and that took about 9 ½ years until it got to that point. Not only does it take more time, but we have no clue whatsoever as to what we are to expect. This can go either very well for us or it can go horribly, horribly wrong. We could discover a whole other planet, or we could discover a huge asteroid heading towards us. That is exactly why we should build bigger and better telescopes. We would be able to see what it is we are heading toward. Take for example 51 Pegasi b, which was the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star. If it weren’t for the ELODIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, we would have never known it was there. If we only got better funding to NASA, we could make even more discoveries, make even more interstellar missions and maybe even discover life, maybe.
I understand, however that it would be very expensive to give so much funding, but we can help get the money. We could sell more goods overseas, stop building things unnecessarily, and do our part. Let people donate to NASA and help raise enough money to afford this feat.
In conclusion, by selling more goods, buying less merchandise, and giving NASA more funding; we can explore new worlds. I would like to thank you for your time, and you have yourself a nice 4 years.
Sincerely,
Matthew C.
Billings, MT
Works Cited
NASA Fiscal Year 2016 pdf
@natpriorities. "Military Spending in the United States." National Priorities Project. Web. 02 Nov. 2016.