Russian Space Industry To Receive $69 Billion Through 2020 64
An anonymous reader sends word that the Russian Space industry will be getting a big boost over the next eight years. Prime Minister Medvedev has approved $68.71 billion in space-related funding from 2013 to 2020. That's a huge increase from the $3.3 billion spent annually in 2010 and 2011. The increased funding is one of several efforts to restoring Russia's slowly fading spaceflight capabilities. "The failure of a workhorse Proton rocket after launch in August caused the multimillion-dollar loss of an Indonesian and a Russian satellite. A similar problem caused the loss of a $265 million communications satellite last year. Medvedev criticized the state of the industry in August, saying problems were costing Russia prestige and money." Medvedev said, "The program will enable our country to effectively participate in forward-looking projects, such as the International Space Station, the study of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies in the solar system."
That's HALF of NASA's budget (Score:5, Informative)
That's a lot of money for space research. . Do they know something we don't?
What are you talking about? No it is not!
They use some of that money for manned space missions rather than for research. Still, their previous $3 billion annual budget could afford to send men to space while NASA's $18 billion [wikipedia.org] annual budget apparently cannot. Now Russia announces a spending increase up to USD$68.71 billion over eight years (USD$8.59b a year), roughly half of what NASA's sliced up budget is currently.
Neil deGrasse Tyson's video pleas We Stopped Dreaming [youtu.be] and its follow-up A New Perspective [youtu.be] proposed we increase NASA spending to 1% of the US Federal Budget (current spending: 0.49% [wikipedia.org]) suggests we could go to Mars and innovate the way we did in the 70s. That's significantly more than Russia's new investment and would help us keep our lead. Otherwise, we're losing both innovation and innovators.
I'd like NASA to be funded by the largest of:
* 1% of the US Federal Budget ($3.8t [wikipedia.org] -> $38b in 2011)
* Half of the US DOD's Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation budget ($79b [wikipedia.org] -> $39b in 2010)
* 5% of the whole US Military budget ($550b [wikipedia.org] -> $27b in 2011, $708b [wikipedia.org] -> $35b in 2012)
This extra funding would come from otherwise allotted military spending (so an increase to the military budget would typically increase NASA's budget as well). As I noted a few paragraphs earlier, this would roughly double the current $18b budget and would bring us to Mars.