This is an unlikely comparison if I ever saw one. According to ex-NASA Administer Mike Griffin, the US spends more money on pizza in a year than it does on the US space agency. If you thought that was funny, the best has yet to come…
…polls have concluded that most US citizens believe NASA receives 24% of the annual $3 trillion federal budget. In actuality, NASA receives… wait for it… less than 1% ($18 billion).
Now stand up, and stop rolling around on the floor laughing hysterically. No wonder people get so pissed with NASA when they think 24% of the national annual budget is invested into the exploration of space! No guys, 1%. Is that really too much to pay for the advancement of science, exploration, technology and human ingenuity? Fancy donating few percent of your annual pizza budget to NASA?
“What we do is huge, and we do it for chump change – less than the annual market for pizza,” Griffin said earlier in the week during a New York presentation to aerospace businessmen. The annual US market for pizza is $27 billion.
$27 billion? Wow.
I’ve always liked Griffin. He was a pretty strong leader of NASA and he’s a tireless manned space exploration advocate. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), thus stimulating the private sector to start pushing into space, carrying out NASA contracts to the International Space Station.
When the NASA budget is being dwarfed by the annual sales of a product consisting of a doughy base and three toppings, I can’t help but think commercial space options are the way forward…
Source: AL.com
astroengine.com 
More interesting comparison: Space vs Military or Pizza vs Military or Everything else vs Military
The Italian's do it again – go pizza… ;-)But on a sensible note, it is stupid how ill informed the US people are when it comes to the budgets in science – and the stupid thing is – no-one in the US corrects them! Say no more…
Polls? Which polls? And “most” US citizens? 150,000,000+ US citizens believe that 24% of the budget goes to NASA? I find that number highly suspect.
Polls? Which polls? And “most” US citizens? 150,000,000+ US citizens believe that 24% of the budget goes to NASA? I find that number highly suspect.
I actually took the liberty of both ReTweeting this, and also emailed to a few of my peeps that think we need to cut back on NASA'a budget. I personally would not mind giving up a pizza or two, if that money would go to NASA!
I think most people have no idea how much we spend on NASA at all. And if asked, I bet they'd say we spend too much on it, and not enough on the problems here on the planet. IMO, I think spending more on NASA may help provide a way to solve some of those problems….
If we (the U.S.) are ever going to get to Mars- and possibly even “only” the Moon- before Russia, China and possibly Japan, India- and now, it seems, possibly even North Korea and Iran, the way our NASA funding is going- it looks as though the U.S. may have to start levying a special sales tax on pizza and other snack foods for our space program! Howz 'bout instead us tax payers start writing congress and the president and ask that they set up a special voluntary tax just for NASA? Or maybe even let NASA set up donation boxes at stores (“please join the March of Quarters for NASA”). I've read that at least a small majority of Americans support the space program, so if many of them accept the notion that they're kicking in up to 24% of their taxes for it, then maybe they could handle being asked to kick in a few bucks here and there for NASA directly, or at least get the congress to tweak the budget a few measly tenths or hundredths of a percent of all of the other budgetary recipients (well, maybe not the defense department's; they may wind up having to nuke North Korea and Iran to stop their own nuke program. That'll slow up any “space exploration” program of theirs) to be re-directed to NASA, at least for a while until we get Bush's Moon-Mars project done.
I never knew that food can be so powerful that even space is overpowered! Pizza is becoming popular and more popular. Italian pizza's is really something.