How? NASA budget is around 20-30bn in recent years, same scale as US Space Force department budget (26bn in recent years, 40bn in 2026). Comparable, but not minuscule.

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AceJohnny2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Just to spell it out:

> in comparison

The total 2026 US Defense budget is 1.06 Trillion dollars, or ~1,060 Billion dollars. NASA's 2026 budget is 24.5 Billion dollars, or 2% as much as the defense budget.

You chose to single out the Space Force, which has the smallest budget of the 5 branches of the US military. For contrast, the Navy's budget alone is 235 Billion $, close to 10x NASA.

For further comparison, the R&D budget of a single private company, Apple, was $34B in 2025.

	▲	walrus01 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's hard to say specifically that the exact figure of the Space Force budget is the entirety of what the US military spends on "space" annually, since a good portion of that will be programs which are under the umbrella of the NRO or NSA or NGA (aka NGIA) agency budgets.

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whatever1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is the space force budget relevant? The US has had spy satellites decades before the clown made the space force for his family and friends to feast.

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r3trohack3r an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We have organizations chartered for land, air, and sea superiority. It seems fairly reasonable to have an organization chartered for space superiority, instead of leaving that adhoc across the other forces.

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Loughla an hour ago | parent [-]

Air? I know it's splitting hairs, but there was already a branch with much experience of launching and flying things.

	▲	jayGlow 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		every branch has experience launching and flying things but we still have an air force.

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jandrewrogers 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Space Force has existed for decades before Trump. It was part of the Air Force and is still organized under that Department. They have been slowly increasing its independence as a branch of the military for a long time.

It isn't much different than how the Air Force was eventually carved out of the Army Air Corps.

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walrus01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

As a small example of the size/scale of the money spent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches

"Air Force", "Space Force" are maybe well known to the general population, not many people outside of military/government/tech circles even know the NRO or NGIA exists or what the acronym means. The line gets a bit blurry between Air Force money spent, NRO, NSA, in some regards it's just better to think of it as buckets of how things get labeled within the larger DoD.

My personal favorite mission patch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247#/media/File:NROL_39_ve...

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T-A 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

NGIA (Natural Gas Innovation Act? Nursery & Garden Industry Australia? Next Generation Identification and Awareness) had me stumped until I realized it must be a typo:

https://www.nga.mil/

	▲	walrus01 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not a typo despite the domain name, it's been called the NGIA in written documents for a long time. The use of "NGA" is actually somewhat recent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

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dmix 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From google:

> NASA's total enacted budget for fiscal year 1996 was approximately $13.9 billion

> a 1996 bipartisan commission report noted that the NRO possessed "by far the largest budget of any intelligence agency," and contemporary experts track the broader military space budget at roughly $10 billion to $11 billion annually for the NRO alone

So pretty similar budgets. The NRO imaging lens used in Nancy Grace was manufactured in 1999 but planning started in 1996.