Just As I Suspected

Scholars, I've blogged before about the troubling misconceptions my fellow Americans hold about our national space agency. But this demonstrates that the trouble goes even deeper than many of us had feared.

When asked to estimate NASA's allocation of the national budget, people respond with amounts averaging 24%. TWENTY-FOUR PERCENT. Scholars, if NASA got 24% of the national budget, I would be writing this from my moon condo. And I wouldn't be typing on a keyboard, I would be using nanotechnology to blog using only the power of my thoughts.

It's telling that NASA was the part of the budget on which people overestimated most wildly. I hate to blame the media, because it's such a cliche, but to hear the mainstream media talk about it, you'd think NASA was burning up all our money on their pointless toys. In fact, they do quite a bit with very little.

For the record, NASA's allocation is 0.58%.