Categories: NASAVideos

Video: NASA’s Pursuit of Light and Big Science

The folks at NASA Goddard’s multimedia division have outdone themselves this time on a new video compilation which, really, shows how NASA dreams big science. Its asks the big questions of why we really explore and how important these explorations can be. It shows views of the Earth, the planets, the Sun, and the endless universe beyond. The video description says it best: “Come for the cool, stay for the music, take away a sense of wonder to share. It’s six minutes from Earth to forever, and you can see it here!”

And what will be lost if NASA is allowed to just fade away through neglect? If you live in the US, contact your Congress members and encourage them to support NASA. Currently NASA’s budget isn’t big enough to even show up as a line on a pie chart, and represents 0.46% of the US budget — less than half a penny for every dollar spent in the US, and has been relatively unchanged for 25 years.

Here’s a graph of what NASA’s percentage of the budget has been like over time:

“NASA contributes to society in massively huge ways in terms of technological, economical, and inspirational progress,” says the website Penny4NASA. “The progress that we have seen in the last 40 years comes largely from the world’s extremely talented scientists and engineers. Now, talk to most any scientist and/or engineer of the last 40 years, and we are willing to bet that they were drawn into their chosen field by something NASA related.”

Check out Penny4NASA for more information and to sign a petition to ask for more funding for NASA.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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