Electric vehicles registered in the US

NASA's Artemis program spending and the number of electric vehicles registered in the United States have, between 2015 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.977. The implied synergy between getting humans to the Moon and getting Americans into Teslas is not, unfortunately, on any federal org chart. It should perhaps be. It would explain several budgets.

NASA's Artemis program grew from about $2 billion in 2015 to over $7 billion by 2023 as SLS and Orion development matured. US EV registrations rose from around 400,000 to over 3.5 million in the same period, driven by Tesla's scaling manufacturing, federal tax credits, and state-level mandates. Both trends are expressions of a decade in which the United States meaningfully recommitted to both long-duration industrial projects — space and energy transition — after a long period of inattention. The SLS and the Model 3 are not on the same production line. They are both, however, in the same policy environment.

Nine years of two lines rising together often describes a country remembering how to build things. The rocket and the electric car are both downstream of the same policy turn. Neither would exist otherwise.