| HN Mirror

It would be almost impossible to get a reliable estimate for other countries, most do not have separate civilian and military space programs like the US. For example, the ESA is building Galileo, a positioning system similar to GPS, primarily for strategic military needs. The Russians and the Chinese, who make up almost the entire remainder of global space spending after the EU, spend quite a bit on military space, but there is not reliable data. In fact, there is basically no data on Chinese spending at all, it's an industry estimate of their spending based on outside observations. In addition, there is some crossover each way. Hubble, in particular, received substantial benefit from military research into spy satellites, not to mention the recent gift of two space telescopes to NASA from NRO. At best it's unclear how to decouple the spending in the US, and nearly impossible internationally. I believe going with the totals is fair, as the approximate civilian to military ratio would be pretty close internationally, given the obvious military implications of space, like ICBM's and spying, the interchangeable nature of the fundamental research in each field (e.g. ICBM guidance systems research can be applied to landing on Mars, spy satellites are space telescopes if you turn them around), and the countries involved.