They Were Operating on a Low Budget
Johnson’s mission is to assess how much the damage from a collision would spread if an asteroid hit a major city. Creating something like the New York City model is a major undertaking and sadly, Johnson doesn’t have a big budget for it. Fortunately, his team managed to get Congress to see why their work was so important. So in 2015, Congress agreed to bump up the project’s budget from $5 million a year to $50 million.