Special Effects artist Doug Drexler had an article forwared tohim by Michael Okuda (both "Star Trek" production alumni), and he posted it on his blog:
http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/the-importance-of-space-exploration/---------------------
I received this from Mike last night and thought you would find it of interest:
Just got the following from Jeff Hanley, who is the manager of Project Constellation for NASA. Jeff, of course, grew up loving Star Trek, just like the rest of us, but now he’s helping to launch the next generation of spaceships. - Mike
Good morning, all…
Just a few thoughts to share, including some reflections on what the space program generally means to the nation, and more specifically the value of what Constellation both symbolizes and cultivates…
As I cruised around the web recently, I was looking for data on just how big the ’space industry’ (or ’space economy’ as preferred by some) is… many numbers are thrown about, and any given number has to come with many ‘what’s in and what’s out’ explanations. But I came upon one site that seemed to rack up some numbers that were consistent with other various sources I had seen and organized it in a way that I could get my head around it.
As you likely understand, NASA’s annual budget hovers in the range of $17B to $18B per annum. That is for the entire human spaceflight, science, aeronautics, and exploration portfolios, as well as the upkeep of NASA’s institutions to execute those missions across 10 NASA centers around the country. The preponderance of that annual budget flows to industry, whom we contract with to produce most of our mission hardware and support.
The context of the global space market really puts the nation’s investment into perspective. See the links below… but the upshot is, the space economy within which NASA operates is 10x to 20x the size of our annual civil space outlays… that’s $200B to $300B or more, depending again on what you count in or out. The data shown in these links is from 2005 and 2006, so one can reasonably expect 5-10% growth over the last couple years in most sub-sectors.
http://www.thespacereport.org/content/overview/activity.php-------more at the link----------------------------