NASA has refuted rumours that the earth will go through six days of complete darkness in December due to a solar storm. According to the reports that surfaced online, it was claimed that the Earth will experience 6 days of almost complete darkness from Tuesday the 16 – Monday the 22 in December.The “days of darkness” hoax seems to be an annual occurrence for NASA, which has had to dismiss such fear mongering on a regular basis. A close inspection of the NASA website also reveals that the agency never released any official statement regarding the 6 days of darkness or solar storm.

This prompted an exasperated David Morrison, a senior astrologist at NASA, to say: As far as the NASA confirmation claim, clearly none of these questioners bothered to look on the nasa.gov website to see if this was true. Also, none apparently was concerned that this amazing announcement from NASA was not reported in the newspapers or TV news.

Meanwhile, a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has revealed that the US spent about $40 billion on its space program, as China’s space budget, which is the second largest in the world, was about $11 billion in 2013; the next, Russia’s, was roughly $8.6 billion; and India’s, the fourth largest, was about $4.3 billion.
The US space budget is divided between NASA and a number of other institutions such as the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation (Office of Commercial Space Transportation), the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of the Interior’s Geological Survey (USGS) and some others.
Last year NASA spent almost 18 billion of $40 billion counted by the OECD. The funding has been lowered since 2011, when the Shuttle program, operated 1981-2011, was stopped. The peak in US space spending was in 2009, when it invested $47.5 billion in exploration.