NASA's slightly better deal with Congress in 2015

This year NASA is getting about 1.23 billion dollars more from the US government than they did last year, which is good. It's not fantastic, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. This comes as news in the release of the 2016 omnibus spending bill, which gives NASA more money than the white house requested earlier this year.

As noted by Engadget, the extra cash will be used in NASA's newest program for commercial crew transport. We spoke about this earlier this year in an article by the name of Launch America: SpaceX, Boeing to taxi NASA astronauts to ISS.

Below you'll find a chart (with the last couple of bars added by SlashGear) showing the percentage of the total spending bill the US government allots for NASA every year. We have yet to see the percentage this year, but if spending totals are similar to last year, we'll see a very similar percentage-of-total in the end.

Things are looking up, but we're still living in a world where space exploration isn't valued at nearly the height of late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps because we were in a race.

Above via Space News you'll find a full run-down of the bill's requirements for NASA – their expectations for where the cash should be spent over the next four quarters of the full fiscal year 2016.

You can see the full spending bill at House.gov if you love pain.