We've talked a lot at The Planetary Society about our strong desire to fund NASA's Planetary Science Division at $1.5 billion per year. This number doesn't come out of nowhere. It's the historical average for the program that has produced the current golden age we find ourselves living in today.

Over the summer our policy intern Lori Dajose and myself explored the recent history of planetary science funding at NASA. We went through ten years of public budgets, picked out the funding for planetary exploration, and corrected it for inflation and made it programmatically consistent. Michael Wong of Caltech helped us visualize the results you see below, which speak for themselves.

Amounts are in millions, and are plotted against the number of missions in development in the President's annual budget request.