Since then yes, there is a downward trend but it's a change from 1% to 0.4% over a 28 year period is hardly "rapid".
It's about as fast as you can go without outright firing half of your staff on the spot, which probably wouldn't work so well. It's as rapid as rapid gets.
Halving your expenditure over a 28 years period is as rapid as rapid gets?
After the space race it went from 4.5% in 1966 to 1% in 1975.
That's more than quartering the budget in 9 years. Now THAT is a rapid scaling down and we all know why - the space race was over. The US won.
The public interest was waning, they could no longer justify that level of spending. That's why the later Apollo missions were scrapped.
It's "rapidly scaling down" I take issue with. It's clearly not true. There was a rapid scaling down after the 60's, sure.
Since then yes, the general trend has been downwards but in the last 5 years NASA spending has gone up in real terms.
Since 2010 the budget has been pretty consistently hovering around 0.5% of the budget (0.52% in 2010, 0.49% this year).
the inconvenient truth remains obvious.
And what do you think that
is? What are you actually getting at here? I imagine NASA budgets could be affected by private enterprises by SpaceX - why let NASA launch your satellites if SpaceX can do it cheaper? But that's just a shifting of the money devoted to space exploration* elsewhere. (*using the word in the very loosest sense, I mean it to cover all space related stuff from manned missions to launching probes to fly past Pluto to launching satellites for GPS etc). Let's agree that budgets have, over time, gone down as a %age of the total budget. What do you think that's a smoking gun of?
NASA doesn't seem anywhere close to being quietly closed down, their budget this year is over $20bn, they have over 17,000 employees. They're not about to turn the lights off.
I'm not sure what your actual point is here.