Over the previous three decades, our nation’s leaders have reduced NASA’s buying power by 25%. (TheGuardian.com, Data Blog, “NASA Budgets: U. S. spending on space travel since 1958 updated”; contains a chart showing budgets as well as NASA’s portion of the federal budget.)
It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.
