RE: Shuttle lands, wow!
Here's something I pulled out that dispels the myth of the return on investment,
Not only does NASA’s public relations approach fail to dispel the obscurity of the thousands of technologies the agency develops, but no one has accurately calculated the actual value of NASA spin offs. (Daniel Lockney, editor of Spinoff, cites widely quoted numbers from informal studies in the 80s and 90s that estimate NASA generates between 7 and 22 dollars for every dollar invested in NASA research. But, according to a 1998 report by the Federation of American Scientists, those numbers are unrealistically high, having been calculated out of NASA’s research budget, not it’s overall budget.) From 1978 to 1986, the height of research and development on the shuttle—and presumably fertile territory for potential spin off—NASA spent $55 billion, only $2.5 billion of which was considered R&D; the other $52.5 billion went to overhead like salaries and maintaining communications networks. The agency reports that during that same period, $5 billion went back into the economy in the form of spin-off technology, a return on investment of about 10 cents on the dollar against the overall budget, a loose estimate at best without detailed scrutiny—something NASA has yet to undertake.