“To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.” On Sept. 12, 1962, president John F. Kennedy presented his famous speech encouraging America to reach for new heights. Over the next decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would launch several vessels into orbit, help direct six landings on the moon, create countless technologies still in use today, and at the height of its time, be allocated almost 900 percent of the federal budget percentage allocated to it today. Things have changed greatly though, and NASA needs to receive better funding.

At its peak, NASA was allocated about 4.4 percent of the total federal budget. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, NASA was allocated about 2.6 percent of the federal budget. When Apollo 17, the last manned moon mission, landed in 1972, NASA was allocated a measly 1.6 percent of the federal budget. Currently, NASA operates on around 0.5 percent of the federal budget.
In order to fix NASA’s funding, we must first determine the problem. Since NASA is a public institution, he biggest determiner of NASA’s budget is public opinion. A poll from the National Air and Space Museum, which collected data from 1978 to 1999, said, “over 70 percent [of Americans] say they have a favorable impression [of the space program], compared to less than 20 percent that hold an unfavorable impression.”
Meanwhile, a poll taken in 1996 found that Americans generally thought NASA received around 20 percent of the federal budget, while around that time they actually received close to 5 percent. Educating the public would clearly help with this unfortunate situation.
However, NASA has done some amazing work with the low funding they receive today. From making breast cancer screenings less painful, to improving water runoff on highways, to even improving the aerodynamics of Nerf gliders, NASA has been able to improve the lives of not only most Americans, but people all around the world. This should not be a reason to keep NASA underfunded though, but rather an invitation to increase NASA’s budget and see what could happen.
Even today, almost 42 years after the last moon landing, NASA continues to improve our lives via asteroid detention, futuristic inventions and continued exploratory missions—such as the Space Interferometry Mission, which was planned to find Earth-sized planets in habitable zones–despite the inadequate budget. People everywhere should encourage congress to explore increasing funding for NASA, and in our future.