A common critique of NASA is that it’s funding can be better spent on other programs that don’t involve space. This argument neglects the abundance of NASA programs that collect data on earth. To demonstrate the value of NASA’s funding, several visualizations of data sets available to public through NASA’s website were created. Visualizations, included locally in the report with tooltip interaction, show NASA’s financial data, contribution to science, world data, and detection of asteroids. The data that created these visualizations could not be obtained without the proper funding that NASA receives. Future visualizations can be performed of datasets that may be open to the public in upcoming years.
I have always had a deep passion for NASA ever since I was young. I still find the advancements that NASA has made for the sake of humanity, the United States, and every curious mind to justify its existence and funding. Unfortunately, this is not a shared opinion in many of my peers who believe NASA funding is a waste of American Taxpayer dollars and that the exploration of space does not benefit the average citizen. Many arguments have been made to refute this point with the acknowledgment of inventions such as better tires for automobiles that have been created from NASA’s space projects which benefit the everyday American. I find that the problem with many of these arguments is that one can simply be unsatisfied with the specific inventions mentioned or may believe the inventions were not worth the funding. It is the goal of this project to use publicly accessible data from NASA’s website to show how they are making an impact for the everyday American and that NASA is worth every dollar it is funded with. NASA’s official website has many datasets, but for the sake of this project only datasets available in .csv form will be used to attempt to prove NASA’s worth. Data that requires NASA’s software to utilize, such as many of the climate change data, will not be used in this project as it is not as easily reproduced as csv data. Data collected for this project can be broken into four categories that the remainder of this project will analyze: budgetary data, data on NASA patents, ecological data, and asteroid data.
One of the main critiques of the NASA program is the cost. Many would argue that money being spent on this program could be used better on other programs. Although NASA works on many projects that span all types of work, many of which are directly involved with improving life here on Earth, I think it’s important to break this argument down further. Let’s analyze how NASA has been funded through the years and then compare it to the funding of other government programs. The first graph in the accompanying visualization shows NASA’s budget since its founding in 1959. The budget is especially high during the Cold War and recent years and low during the end of the Cold War. It seems that NASA’s worth was understood by the government after the 1980’s as the budget was not allowed to plummet to that low level again. The second graph in this visualization shows key programs in the 2022 US budget. The small sliver in black represents the total general science, space and technology budget that NASA is contained in. Every other program in this chart, excluding agriculture, receives more funding than NASA. Most notably, the US national defense budget is 20 times larger than entire science, space, and technology budget. Even the budget for natural resources and environment is better funded than NASA. For those who argue that NASA’s small budget can be better used elsewhere, I would argue that moving money from some of these other programs would be a more reasonable argument as they bleed more American tax dollars than NASA does.
As an organization that was created for the exploration of science, it is important to understand how much NASA contributes to science. Besides the obvious contributions such as the ISS, landing on the moon, and more recently exploring mars, American taxpayers should be confident that NASA is producing and protecting their scientific invention. By analyzing patent data, we can begin to understand how NASA stands in this field. Although the majority of projects NASA works on cannot be openly patented, NASA currently holds almost 1,000 active patents with more in the application process. These patents allow private business to use NASA technology in a commercial setting. This allows for major inventions created by NASA to reach a greater majority of the public instead of keeping all technology as a government secret. The accompanying visualization shows active patents and applications as well as the NASA locations that contributed these patents.
NASA collects a large amount of data about Earth. The majority of this data relates to climate change, but as mentioned before, this data is only available through NASA’s online tools. Besides climate change, NASA has collected data on subjects like global landslides and global roads. This data can be used by the average person to, for example, predict the most likely places for landslides to occur and their potential lethality. The first map in this visualizations shows landslides around the world and the deaths associated with them. There are clear trends to where these landslides occur and allows for the prediction of where future landslides will occur. The second map in this figure shows the KM and miles of roads in each country. This is an interesting metric for fossil fuel emission and climate change studies. Countries with the large road mileage can also greatly benefit from electric vehicles and alternate energy solutions. Data like this can help to reveal that certain countries, like the US, can benefit from interest in such programs.
“Asteroids are nature’s way of saying, “How’s that space program going?” as astronomers like to say.” — Christian Davenport
Would you like to be crushed by an asteroid hurdling at earth? I wouldn’t. Thankfully, NASA shares this opinion and has been collecting data on near earth asteroids and determining their risk to humanity for decades. Below is a visualization of total near earth and dangerous asteroids as they are discovered throughout the years. NASA currently has detected over 30,000 asteroids which over 2,000 are considered potentially dangerous. Although none of these asteroids are on direct path towards Earth, this situation can change at any time and requires constant monitoring. Without a proper budget for NASA, humanity may be susceptible to an catastrophic asteroid impact.
This project was completed only using NASA data that is open to public and accessible through CSV. Much of NASA’s data obtained requires a security clearance to access in order to protect costly research and not to give valuable scientific data to our enemies. Some data open to the public in NASA’s datasets are unavaliable in the csv form and are accessible only through NASA software which would not fit the scope of this project.
I faced several challenges while approaching this project. Most of these challenges arised in obtaining the data. Many of NASA’s dataset are not available in .CSV form and are only accessible through NASA’s website. This made it difficult to obtain data. Once I found data I could use, I encountered some difficulty importing data from the csv’s to Tableau. This most likely occurred as many of these datasets are convoluted which resulted in some column names not being imported. Thankfully, these were easy fixes as I was not using every column in the dataset and just needed to preprocess the ones I wished to work with. Due to the convoluted nature of some of these datasets, especially the financial and asteroid ones, some difficulty arose from understanding what certain data meant. This required a further exploration into NASA’s resources and, in the case of the asteroids, the background of the data itself to truly understand the data I was working with. Other issues such as organizing data was solved using calculated fields in Tableau. For example, budget data was provided in thousands of millions. For ease of reading, I used a calculated field to convert these values to billions and then used that data for visualization purposes.
Visualization 1: I used a line chart to depict NASA’s budget since its founding to allow the reader to view the changes in the budget especially at key times such as the space race. I also decided to place a pie chart of the US 2022 budget so that the numbers seen in the line chart can be placed in context with the rest of the federal budget. The color scheme was chosen to emphasize how little NASA receives compared to other government groups. A label with text was also used for this reason. The graphs are interactable with a tooltip so that the user can access any data point they want.
Visualization 2: I used a simple bar graph to show patents held and applied for by NASA. I believe this is the most straightforward way to visualize this data. In order to show where these patents are coming from, I used a tree map as it is more visually appealing compared to a simple bar graph. I used a color scheme of red, white, and blue to evoke some patriotism within the reader. These graphs both contain tooltip interactivity but will most likely not have to be used by the user.
Visualization 3: For both charts in this visualization I used world maps. I wanted to remind the reader that NASA collects data of Earth and what better way to do that then showing graphs of the earth. Color schemes of red to grey were used to emphasize landslides with large fatalities and countries with large road coverage. The landslides and countries are interactable with a tooltip to see the exact number of fatalities or KM of roads that a country holds.
Visualization 4: I used an area graph to depict near earth asteroids and potentially hazardous asteroids. This was done to show how, especially in recent years, NASA has been detecting thousands of asteroids and determining their risk to Earth. I used black for the hazardous asteroids to represent their danger to humanity and red for the near earth asteroids to represent thier potential danger. Tooltip interactivity was used to allow the reader to see both near earth and potentially hazardous asteroids for any year they are viewing regardless of what graph they hover over.
Future work on this project could expand the data being used to a more broad source. For example, data from other sources besides NASA and data not in .csv form. Specifically, NASA collects a lot of data on climate change that was only accesible through NASA’s online software. Using this software, a visualization demonstrating how much information NASA has collected regarding the changing climate would be helpful in persuading the target audience of this project. Additionally, data and visualizations regarding future Earth related interests that NASA has plans for would be advantageous.