Japan's 'Spaceguard' CentTo Track Celestial Clutter

Jay,

The original question posed was whether Japan (specifcially ISAS/NASDA) is spending more on useful space activities than NASA.

The data you presented is completely irrelevant to that question.

Let me decompose the issue into a couple of separate questions to clarify your thinking.

Does NASA spend more money than than ISAS and NASDA ? Clearly yes, many times more.

Does NASA launch more "stuff" into space than ISAS and NASDA ? again, clearly yes, many times more.

But once again, those were not the questions posed.

The question is, does NASA spend more money and/or effort into things which will get us to the High Frontier than NASDA/ISAS ? i.e. things which are interesting and useful. That is a much more difficult question to answer.

Cleary the vast majority of the money NASA spends and the "stuff" NASA puts into orbit, are useless pork which contribute nothing to getting us to the high frontier. Can we say the same things about NASADA and ISAS ?....possibly to some extent, but nothing like the scale of NASA.

I submit that the PERCENTAGE of money NASDA/ISAS spends on USEFUL things is a lot higher than NASA, although I really have no quantitative data to support that, I do not know much about the breakdown of NASDA/ISAS expenditures.

My intuition is that expenditures of NASA and ISAS/NASDA on useful things is pretty close. The nice thing about NASADA/ISAS is that they are a lot smaller than NASA, so do not have anything like as much overhead and beurocracy, so is probably a more pleasant environment to work in, and hence probably more productive per dollar.

The question still remains unanswered, and hence is an interesting one.