The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is a per mille of that. NASA has a yearly budge

The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is a per mille of that. NASA has a yearly budget of 20 billion, ~1/3 of which goes into science. (BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year) That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.