That new NASA budget has been assessed, spotlighting which companies and institutions receive the most funds from the space agency. For fiscal year 2024, the White House is proposing a $27.2 billion budget for NASA.
The Budget requests $27.2 billion in discretionary budget authority for 2024, a $1.8 billion or 7-percent increase from the 2023 enacted level.
Statista, a leading provider of market and consumer data, notes that in the fiscal year 2022, the U.S. space agency awarded Musk’s company about $2 billion in contract volume out of its total approved budget of $24 billion.
Image credit: Statista
Florian Zandt, a “data journalist” for Statista, has taken a close look at the NASA budgeting, reporting:
“SpaceX received 25 percent more funds than in 2021 and overtook Boeing as the agency’s second-most-awarded contractor. In November, one month after the end of the previous fiscal year, NASA also announced $1.2 billion in funding for another Artemis lunar surface landing mission.”
Cash flow: JPL
“Apart from SpaceX, the California Institute of Technology benefitted the most from NASA’s budget. This can be explained by the fact that the university operates NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab research facility,” Zandt explains. “Between October 2021 and the end of September 2022, about $2.7 billion flowed to the university, roughly 12 percent more than the previous year.”
By contrast, the other top contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and SAIC — not to be confused with the e-mobility joint venture between General Motors and Wuling — were in some cases awarded significantly less budget than in the previous year, Zandt observes.
Starship
Credit: Elon Musk/SpaceX
Starship
In another Statista data look, Zandt notes that SpaceX, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is currently preparing the first orbital test flight of its Starship system, scheduled for March 2023. “The latest rocket model is expected to transport people and cargo between Earth and the Moon in the future and, according to Musk, represents an essential building block in his plan to colonize Mars.”
“Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to issue a license for the flight. The U.S. authority regulates rocket launches in the U.S., and numerous past planned launch dates have already been postponed due to the lack of a license. In principle, the FAA is likely to be well-disposed toward SpaceX. The company is one of NASA’s most important contractors.”
Image credit: Statista
Expensive business
Zandt underscores the point that launching rockets to deliver payloads into orbit is an expensive business.
“So costly that, thus far, only government space agencies or government-related companies have transported astronauts or satellites into space. Still, the private space industry has been booming in the last couple of years, with companies like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX providing varying degrees of suborbital and orbital space travel and transportation.”
In 2022, according to Bryce Tech, an analytics and engineering firm, eleven private providers launched 94 rockets – of which SpaceX alone sent 61 rockets into orbit, Zandt adds.
“This compares with 71 launches by space agencies or government-related companies. The leader in this category is the prime contractor for the Chinese space program, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (35 launches). It is followed by Roscosmos (21 launches), the space agency of the Russian Federation. However, the private and public sectors are often intertwined rather than strictly separated. For example, SpaceX has been awarded NASA contracts worth $2 billion in the agency’s fiscal year 2022 alone.”
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