The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, also know as NASA, was formed on July 29, 1958 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Since then NASA has always been involved in the majority of the United States space exploration efforts and technological discoveries. Their budget has always been a small amount of the allotted federal budget since the start of the program. On average under 1% of the federal budget goes towards NASA. Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that -- a penny on a dollar -- we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow." In 2014 the federal budget of NASA was 17.647 billion dollars, which is right at half a percent of the federal average. Second lowest in the modern era only next to the 2013 percentage of 0.49%. The last time NASA had over 1% of the federal budget was in 1993 and it was at 1.01% of the budget. The everyday items NASA has given the world are taken for granted every day. It is hard to create groundbreaking discoveries with one of the smallest budgets of all of the federal programs. Increasing the budget would be a major boost to not only the economy of the United States but also to the economy of the world. The world is filled with war, poverty, racism, and every other terrible thing that can be though of. It is on the edge of a total cataclysm. The exploration of space is that thing that can unite the world for a greater cause. From being the best exploration program in the world, in the 1960's and 70's, to being one of the worst. The need for the increased funding of NASA is essential now more than ever. (Budget)

NASA is protecting people everyday with early detection and tracking of asteroids that can destroy the world in a few minutes. NASA also undertakes things such as global climate change monitoring and studying the sun to prevent fundamental satellite network knockdowns and helping American farmers with soil control. The list goes on and on but people spend their lives without thinking about these and how important they are for their wellbeing on a day-to-day basis. Understanding where humans come from and knowing where they are going are questions that have questioned upon since the dawn of civilization and thanks to the Hubble Telescope and the Mars Rover the answers are getting closer everyday. It is more likely for there to be life on another world than for there to be no life at all and once that discovery is made it will change life on the planet forever. Thanks to NASA after the Apollo program Doctors Without Borders was created and Nixon passed the Clean Water Act. Exploring the galaxy shows people that they need to care more about the planet. Everyday technology such as microchips, infrared thermometers, solar panels and many more things are thanks to NASA and their exploration of space. These are just a tiny fraction of the things NASA has made possible but, just look at the impact that they have made on the planet and everyday life. These inventions were not created just because they had to nothing better. They had to solve a problem that mankind had never faced before. (Gizmodo)

On the morning of December 15, 2015 NASA got a budget increase of $1.27 billion dollars making their budget for the 2016 fiscal year a total of $19.3 billion. This is an increase of what the Obama administration was going to fund the agency. This means that NASA has a better chance of pulling off its primary mission on schedule and that mission is to have a commercial crew program. This budget still is limiting to NASA. The $19.3 billion is barley even 1% of the national budget. That is the lowest it has ever been on record. For space being such a big opportunity for industry should not the budget be at least ten fold of that. Maybe taking cuts from various programs such as national defense and military spending. Space is the future and NASA is the future space industry. Even with these current funds it is possible that the first launches under the commercial crew program could take place in 2017 as intended. The main motivation for the commercial crew budget increase seems to be ending NASA's reliance on Russia as soon as possible. Since the cancellation of the Shuttle program in 2011, NASA astronauts have been riding into space on the Russian Soyuz rockets, which cost around $80 million per seat. The commercial crew program is aimed at ending this dependent relationship, by getting American astronauts into space on American rockets again. Another big boost that the small amount of money that NASA is receiving this year will help fund the space launch system, which is a giant expendable rocket NASA is building to take astronauts into deep space and on to Mars.  Imagine what could be done with an increased budget for NASA. (Verge)

Congressional support for NASA is at an all time low. All the current politicians are worried about their own self and no one else. The only thing that draws eyes of the congress is a beneficial economic thing that NASA does for the economy. NASA Centers are a significant factor in shaping votes, suggesting that the NASA presence itself plays an important role in influencing legislators. Meanwhile, other forms of economic opportunity based on the relative importance of the aircraft and space manufacturing industries in a given state are factors on how much money NASA will receive, but only in a more limited sense.  When NASA was first created the primary propose of the agency was international prestige, national security, and science and today it only seems to be focused on economics due to a money hungry congress that only will give money to a program if they find it beneficial for them and not for mankind as a whole. "NASA's budget as a percentage of the federal budget has been on a decline from about 1% to 0.5% since the early 1990s" (Influence). Support for NASA spending may actually be related to issues of economic opportunism that individual members of Congress hope to take advantage of to benefit their constituencies. Research looks for correlation between a NASA presence, NASA procurements, and the space industry with continuing support for NASA funding by suggesting that the more important a role the space industry plays for a given member of Congress's constituency, the more likely the member will support NASA Authorization Acts, regardless of the political environment or specifics surrounding the given piece of legislation. This shows the true greed of the American society and forgetting the old school American way. Congress is not looking out for the American people they are only looking for what benefit them best. This is way congress cannot be trusted when it comes to deciding the budget for an organization such as NASA. (Influence)

NASA has done some of the most incredible things since their creation in 1958. In the same year of their creation they sent Explorer 1 into space, which was the first United States satellite. In 1990 they launched the Hubble Telescope into orbit, which shows the expansion of the universe never before imagined. It has 10 times the resolution of a ground-based telescope and 50 times the sensitivity. In 1999, NASA launched the most sensitive X-ray telescope in the world. It can see things no one has ever seen before, such as the split second when space particles disappear into a black hole. In 1972 Pioneer 10 left Kennedy Space Center in 1972, bound for Jupiter. Since there is a known asteroid belt between Earth and Jupiter, astronomers had long believed it to be impassable. This asteroid belt was blocking the path to the universe beyond the outer planets. Pioneer 10 made it through the asteroid belt. In 1970 Apollo 13 was headed for the moon. On April 11, 1970, the spacecraft lifted off. Fifty-five hours and 55 minutes later, an explosion shut down almost every system necessary to sustain life onboard. The string of events leading to the explosion began with one of the engines shutting down two minutes early on liftoff. The string of events set off by the explosion set into motion one of the most amazing collaborative rescues in history. So many things went wrong on Apollo 13, it's an engineering miracle that the crew made it home at all, let alone alive and well. Hands down the largest accomplishment of NASA was Apollo 11. Apollo 11 was the first mission to actually land men on the moon. When astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on its surface on July 20, 1969, and spoke the words "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," the entire world was watching. The landing was such a big event; there are those who believe it could not have happened that the whole thing was staged. Over the decades NASA has accomplished many things, which were labeled as impossible. NASA embodies the American can do attitude and spirit of old, which could be very helpful today with all of the current issues of the world. (HowStuffWorks) 

Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to double NASA's budget from the $17.7 billion, which Obama set in 2013. He believes that rather than focusing on one destination at a time, if a core fleet of launch vehicles that can be customized for a variety of missions and a range of purposes. He believes that this will influence culture like how the Apollo 8 mission's iconic pictures of Earth led to a greater appreciation for the planet and the need to protect it which helped increase the economy. Tyson says "Whatever the needs or urges  --  be they geopolitical, military, economic  --  space becomes that frontier," Tyson said. "Not only do you innovate, these innovations make headlines. Those headlines work their way down the educational pipeline. Everybody in school knows about it. You don't have to set up a program to convince people that being an engineer is cool. They'll know it just by the cultural presence of those activities. You do that, and it'll jump-start our dreams."(Tyson) Tyson's ideology is that if the culture is backing NASA than they can only do positive things and how if the culture is based on science and NASA and current findings the economy will reap the benefits by having an increase number of jobs and increased consumer report and just a moral support of the American people. People will be more willing to donate money to NASA and they will be placed in the lime light like during the Apollo missions. (Tyson)

The General Social Survey, also known as the GSS, is an in-person interview by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The GSS asked people if they believed NASA was too little, just right, or too much on a scale from -1-1 where -1 is too much and 1 is too little. They average out those numbers then add 1 to the average to compensate for tolerance for funding. In 2008 the average came out to be 0.733, which shows that many believe the funding to be too little. In 2008 the amount of money they had was the highest ever but it was one of the lowest percent of the federal budget ever being .60%. Space policy is a rather nebulous issue comprised of both foreign and domestic policy components. Space exploration is clearly a foreign policy issue as it can lead, and has led, to interactions with multiple countries around the globe. However, space science research, educational programs, and technology development are all parts of a domestic space policy. Previous research suggests that the government is responsive to public opinion in regards to domestic issues, though not foreign policy issues. This is why the funding for NASA is hard to distinguish and why it all falls onto congress. The American people know what is happening. They know that even though congress and the figureheads are saying NASA has its most money of all time that it has one of the lowest percent of the federal budget of all time. The people want NASA to have an increased funding. (ScienceDirect)

Many people believe NASA's funding should be totally cut off and space exploration should be totally privatized. Many beliefs are based off of the idea of a free market and call for NASA to close its shuttle program and open up the skies for free market due to the fact that private entrepreneurs tend to produce and invest in a way that attempts to minimize costs in order to gain profit, while the government programs work in the exact opposite manner. One example is when two MIT students, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, sent a camera into space to photograph the curvature of the Earth. For what it takes NASA millions of dollars to do, it took them $150. This is because Lee and Yeh, relying on private initiative and the incentive to minimize costs, filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a Styrofoam beer cooler underneath to hold the camera. NASA, with the reverse incentives, uses rockets, boosters, and expensive control systems that may draw "oohs" and "ahs," but at the expense of the terrible opportunity costs of taxation. If NASA becomes de-funded and space exploration becomes privatized, services can become valuable to consumers, such as employing robot satellites that get information about the Earth to supply high demand for accurate weather forecasts and geological assessments. (Daniels) The issue behind doing this is that NASA employees over 352,000 people, which no privatized company, can do. Jobs are always a positive thing for the economy. Also NASA does operations at a level nobody else can do, which means that they buy goods from all over the market and at an extremely high quantity to do the jobs needed. This is another boost for the economy that would be lost if NASA was de-funded. Another major thing why de-funding is a bad idea is that NASA has on average $21.6 billion in sales and benefits which would be nearly impossible to keep up with for a privatized company and if they were to be de-funded all that money would be taken out of the economy. (Budget) 

NASA Space Science Day Events, also known as NSSD, provide an out of school experiential learning environment for elementary and middle school students. NASA Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science, also known as ARES, staff and scientists train University students to become mentors and lead activities for the younger students. The main objective of this is to push for the love of engineering and space in today's youth. Several weeks prior to the NSSD events, teachers from surrounding schools are invited to participate in a Lunar and Meteorite Certification workshop with complimentary NASA Discovery Program activities. This allows teachers to obtain the Lunar and Meteorite Sample Disks for classroom use. Many of the activities presented to the teachers can be streamlined into their curriculum, thus continuing the NSSD connection to their curriculum. Face it the youth of today is losing interest in space and basically every school subject out there. They want to be on television and magazines and they just want to be in the limelight of the world. In a world full of everyone wanting to follow what's cool and what's hip the main goal of this program is to show students that science can be cool and you can be on covers of magazines and all over television if you make the next major breakthrough in space exploration. (NASA)

The need to increase the funding of NASA is a not only a moral need but also an economical need. NASA is the keystone of the ideal of American can-do attitude and strength. Their ability of overcoming any problem is unseen by any other organization. Without NASA America leaves the top spot of the world's elite countries due to the fact that the world is on the brink of looking out into space and finally discovering the final frontier. 

