I don't it is shopped because you can see the girl from the top picture in the background of the bottom one, she has the metal ghost helmet on, and its properly out of focus. Either a champion shop job or its real.

15-17 billion is a lot of money, yes, but when there is already 100 times as much being spent in the areas you are talking about spending it, I really think space exploration is a justifiable cost.

Maybe I am just a sci-fi nerd, and I do realize that interplanetary colonies are PROBABLY a ways out lol, but we really have been stagnated in that department for the last 25 years as their budget has dwindled.

Of course we need to solve the problems on our own planet but honestly, the two are not really related. 15-17 billion dollars is a lot of money but its worth nothing when nobody knows how to spend it...

NASA and its attached research facilities have brought to market some of the most important consumer technologies currently available. I for one hope with all my might that J. Edgar DID steal all of Tesla's documents and NASA has all kinds of crazy super technology, please let that be reality. But any way you look at it we need to keep NASA alive.

You know whats funny I am totally not a NASA fanboy, Idle Tuesday just made me become one today I suppose.

@IDLE TUESDAY

NASA's budget is extraordinarily small. Something on the order of 15-17 billion annually. By comparison we spend over 38 times that on Defense, and 98 times that on social programs. Our budget in 2007 was 2.784 trillion, NASA is 0.58% of that. By contrast 1.581 trillion were spent on social programs, over 56% of the budget.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/898/1

The Space Review: Putting NASA’s budget in perspective

Everyone needs to shut the eff up about us "wasting" money on NASA, and realize that we need to get on top of this whole space elevator situation, build some giant space dry docks, construct some enormous interstellar ships (while developing some sort of standard long term stasis, duh), and GET THE EFF OUT OF HERE.