NASA has successfully landed its latest rover Perseverance on the surface of Mars, completing its 292 million-mile journey from Earth.
With the first major milestone successfully navigated, Perseverance is now set to spend at least the next 687 Earth days (one year on Mars) exploring the surface within the Jezero Crater, which is believed to have once been a large lake on the surface of the planet.
Should NASA get more budget?
The initial success of Perseverance raises the age old question about NASA; should they get a bigger slice of the federal budget? Last year NASA got $22.7bn from the federal government, which accounted for a little under 0.5% of the total federal budget.
That's no small sum, but in relative terms it is a fraction of the 4.4% of the budget that the Apollo program received at its peak back in the 1960s.The hard thing with space exploration is that the payoffs are often non-linear and unpredictable. Spending an additional $10bn could pay off dramatically with a huge leap forward in our scientific understanding, or it could not.
NASA seems to be increasingly aware of how to win more public support, and therefore funding. Live streams, social media campaigns and interactive multimedia have all been deployed to great effect during the Perseverance mission.
Interestingly, as pointed out by The Atlantic almost a decade ago, public support for the moon landings has generally increased through time. We seem to value the achievements more the further we are from them.
