With all the talk about the need for an Apollo-like effort to develop sustainable energy sources, it’s instructive to look at the amount of money the US has spent on space and energy over the last half-century. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has a nice chart (graphical, numerical) that details the government’s nondefense R&D spending from fiscal year 1953 to 2009.
The US spent more on energy than space only six of the last 54 years — three years in the late ’50s and three years in the early ’80s.
At the height of the space race in the mid-sixties, the US spent a whopping two thirds of its nondefense R&D budget on space. Stoked by the oil crisis of the early seventies, energy R&D spending hit a peak in 1979 at 23.3 percent of the nondefense R&D budget.
Today’s nondefense R&D budget is dominated by health-related spending, but we’re still allocating nearly four times as much money for space as for energy, and energy spending is only about 4.5 percent of the budget. (Some energy programs were shifted to the general science portion of the budget in 1998, so it’s difficult to make direct comparisons with earlier years.)
The incoming administration plans to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years on energy research, development and deployment. That reflects a desperately needed change in priorities. The question is, will it be enough to achieve the energy equivalent of putting people on the moon.