I wrote this post a few days ago, in anticipation of a final paper due tomorrow. Here at Mind on Fire, we are committed to providing you with consistent quality content! 
As we walked out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I explained to GameBoy why the annual Open House was a necessary thing.
“We’re its bread and butter. It’s a government program, so it has to keep the taxpayers interested and convinced of its necessity.”
This got me thinking about how much we actually spend on NASA. For the 2007 fiscal year, NASA is allocated $16.2 billion (which is a $500 million shortfall, and JPL will have to cancel two projects focused on finding earth-like planets around nearby stars). Other ways to slice this: it’s just over half of a percent of the federal budget, or $180 per taxpaying family per year. It’s comparable to the U.S. hanging out for three months in Iraq (but with less loss of human life and greater gain in prestige for the U.S. and scientific benefits for humanity). The top six defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon, each received more from the Defense Department in 2005 NASA’s total budget. The U.S. has committed around $15 billion to fighting AIDS around the world.
It’s worth thinking about the hard numbers. We pay lip service to the universal equality and dignity of humanity and the inestimable value of individual human life, but we live in a competitive, monetized world with limited resources. It’s not very often that our money and our mouth coincide.
That said, is it worth catapulting billions of dollars into space when people go hungry on the earth’s surface? Are there better ways to spend this money? Perhaps there are. In this case, the romantic sees nobility in the pursuit of pure knowledge, and the visionary in me takes it on faith that humanity’s payoff will far exceed the little we invest in the exploration of the universe.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Mark // May 24, 2007 at 8:59 am
Agreed, this money could be spent in much better ways, erradicating world hunger would be a great start!
2 Elaine Frei // May 24, 2007 at 12:16 pm
No, I don’t think there are better ways to spend the money than on space exploration. First of all, I don’t believe it would put food in anyone’s mouth by not spending the money on that. It would likley go into some other program, and chances are it would be a program less advantageous to the whole of humankind than exploring space, expanding our knowledge base, and finding ways to get off the planet for more than just the select few who get to go now.
Second, from a completely pragmatic point of view, the space program creates a wide variety of jobs in a wide variety of sectors in a wide range of skill levels. In an expanding space program, not only do spacecraft have to be built, but buildings to house the programs’ staffs have to be designed and built. The people who work in those buildings have to be fed every day, which will create new jobs in a number of sectors out in the rest of the business world. The buildings have to be cleaned. You don’t need just physicists and other highly traded technical personnel to run a space program. You also need managers, and…what do we call secretaries today?…administrative assistants, and there are a wide variety of other job descriptions to be filled.
And then there is the fact (anyway, I accept it as one) that if we don’t learn to leave the planet we are doomed. We might be doomed anyway, considering the ways in which we behave towards each other on this planet. But creating an infrastructure to live beyond the planet will, I believe, at least give us a little bit more of chance of surviving as a species.
Okay. End of rant. I’m sick today, and not very happy that I couldn’t just stay in bed all day (I just finished work), so I might have come off as a bit more…vehement, perhaps…than I meant to. Sorry if that’s the case.
3 Miko // May 25, 2007 at 9:47 am
I’m with Elaine. I don’t think if we dismantled NASA we’d solve hunger. I think we’d end up invading more countries. Or the same countries for longer. I also think that NASA is one of the best government-run organizations. In terms of intent, I don’t know how well run they are…
The “space race” was possibly a load of saber-rattling that we could have all done without, but it certainly ended up putting us on the moon and we’ve got a space station! How cool is that? Space tourism is on the rise and China seems to be putting us to shame (which I think is good. A horse never runs so fast as when it has other horses to catch & pace it). Personally, I think we should be giving more money to NASA & not less. Maybe we could substitute a few months in Iraq for it…
4 John // Jun 1, 2007 at 8:46 am
Elaine, a very eloquent argument. I agree with you that there are few other programs that the government invests in that ultimately transcend our borders.
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