I wrote a comment piece for our science news blog, Catalyst Science News, with the headline Why we should privatise space. I will link to it when it is published, as it is still to be edited. Part of my argument was that the traditional nation state superpowers were showing a declining interest in space exploration, but I felt I needed some sort of data to illustrate this.
I found some data used by The Guardian Datablog from a few years ago. their sources seemed pretty sound (Office of Management and Budget and richardb.us) so I decided to make a few graphs to go with my article.
I used Google speadsheets to make the graphs, and I'm sure you'll agree they are less than inspiring:
