what would you do with 61 billion dollars?

I don’t know about you, but every year I hear about the billions spent at NASA and wonder what it’s all for. I mean, consider our trip to the moon. Cool? Sure. But what did it gain us? It was basically a billion dollar version of a “who’s is bigger” battle between the United States and the Russians (on a side note, tradition has always suggested an unwritten rule that whoever plants their flag first is the owner. Does that mean that the United States owns the Moon? I mean, all but that part that Tom Cruise bought? ) Velcro was cool for a while but eventually the fad went away and we were left with nothing but a really loud adhesive. And every once in a while you stumble across a heat resistant surface that uses “the same technology as is used on the space shuttle” but c’mon, if you’re heating your fry daddy up to those levels, you should probably steer clear of grease and fire anyway.

So I got to thinking, what if we scaled NASA down to the bare minimum for five years. For five years all we paid for was costs on the International Space Station (because we’ve made promises to assist…but then, that never stopped us before) and maintenance and security costs to keep both the Houston and Cape Canaveral facilities in working order (including the staff to do it). And if, for five years, we took the rest of the budget, could we pay off the U.S. national debt? Here are the figures.

NASA’s budget for 2007 is 16,792.3 billion dollars.
Minus our International Space Station costs of 1,811.3 billion dollars
Assume that it wouldn’t cost us more than 700,000 dollars to pay security and maintenance staff.
And then throw in another 3 million for actual building upkeep (and I think I’m being generous).
And you still come up with a savings of 14,997.3 billion dollars. Or 59,989.2 billion dollars over the course of five years.
Add to that the fact that NASA’s budget is due to increase by just over 300 million dollars each year, and you can tack on another 1.2 billion dollars.
That’s a savings of over 61 billion dollars in five years.

Excited?

Yeah, I was too until I realized that the national debt is at over 8 trillion dollars and climbing at a rate of 2.4 billion dollars a day which means that, even if we froze the national debt and it did not collect a penny of interest, it would still take us fifty years to pay it off using NASA’s budget.

So, still believing that NASA isn’t worth 17 billion dollars a year, the question now goes out to you. What else could we do with 61 billion dollars?