"Star Trek: Into Darkness" brought in about $84 million in its opening weekend — just a month after NASA cut $200 million from its planetary-sciences budget. (In an odd move, NASA's newest budget explicitly states that it will notfund any missions to Europa, the ice-moon of Jupiter that stands as one of the solar system's best candidates for supporting life, noted Casey Dreier, an advocacy and outreach strategist at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to planetary exploration.) [Warp Drive & Transporters: 'Star Trek' Technology Explained (Infographic)]
Those cuts come as NASA and the rest of the federal government negotiate sequestration cuts, which could trim $7 billion from NASA's ledgers next year if the reductions are maintained.
But even without the sequester, NASA hasn't commanded the kind of money needed for real, ambitious space travel in decades, said Marc Millis, a former NASA propulsion physicist and founder of the Tau Zero Foundation, which is dedicated to interstellar travel.
After hitting an apex with the Apollo moon program, NASA's purse shrunk considerably and has stayed stagnant since, Millis said. NASA's funds reached about 4.5 percent of the total federal budget during the Apollo era, Millis calculated. By 2009, NASA's share had fallen to about 0.5 percent. "The amount that's devoted to NASA now is enough to keep it going," he said. "But to do really cool space travel is not possible now."
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