A Comprehensive Guide to the U.S. Civil Space Budget

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview and novel organization of the U.S. civil space budget from FY23 to FY25, highlighting its distribution across agencies and national priorities.

Contribution

It introduces a new representation of the civil space budget organized by six national priority areas, enhancing understanding of cross-sector space activities.

Findings

Civil space appropriations total roughly $44 billion in FY25.

NASA accounts for about 58% of the civil space budget.

The budget data is organized into six key national priority areas.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the U.S. federal civil space budget between FY23 and proposed spending in FY25, providing a foundational reference dataset for civil space budget analyses. Projects that support, enable, or leverage space activities for civil purposes are found in more than 100 individual line items spread across 17 federal departments and agencies and are funded by 4 different appropriations bills. Across all these elements, civil space-related appropriations total roughly 44 billion dollars in FY25, of which NASA constitutes about 58 percent (Figure 1). To better view the cross-cutting nature of space missions and the support that enables them, the second half of this report introduces a novel representation of the civil space budget by organizing the data into six national priority areas: American Leadership and Manufacturing; Workforce Development; Fundamental Science; Efficiency, Improvements, and Growth; Homeland Security; Infrastructure, Energy, and Resiliency; and Remote Sensing Applications (Figure 2). This organization of the data highlights the ubiquity of space-related activity throughout diverse sectors to reach the same common goal.