SHOOTING MONEY INTO SPACE Terrorism. …show more content…
Security. Economic growth. These are some of the current priorities of the United States that are on top of the agenda. However, space exploration is not. The United States is at a comfortable position with the amount of knowledge the world knows about planets, stars and other celestial bodies out in the universe. Right now, there are more problems to deal with than ones that are not close to home. Though what occurs in space has a great impact on what happens to the Earth and therefore us, there needs to be more emphasis on fixing issues on the planet before the United States spends money on venturing out. Since the hype of the space race in the 1960s to now, there has been a dramatic decrease in public enthusiasm for any projects. This is primarily due to the fact that though there have been many successfully completed missions, many still do fail or are cancelled and effectively are a waste of time. For example, the United States has spent millions on different projects that have ended in crashing back to Earth. The most prominent ones were the Space-Based Infrared System which overran costs by about ten billion dollars, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory Satellite which crashed seventeen minutes after lift off, or the Genesis which fell into Utah. Moreover, the outcome of projects could just remain a mystery to NASA such as with the Deep Space 2 or the Mars Polar Lander (MPL). Furthermore, it seems that some of the projects seem completely infeasible regardless of having an unlimited monetary budget. According to Jerry DeGroot, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, “The Earth is indeed doomed, but where might refugees go? Mars makes Antarctica seem like paradise. As for distant galaxies, a spaceship capable of travelling at a million miles per hour (20 times faster than Apollo) would take 4,000 years to reach the nearest star system that might theoretically be hospitable.” What is the purpose for funding these extremely expensive satellites and space technology if there is no guarantee that there will be a sufficient outcome of data, if it will work at all, or even make it to the destination? In reality, there is none. The United States already has enough data to conclude that nothing catastrophic will occur to Earth within several hundreds years, so evidently, continuing increased spending for studying the universe through programs like NASA prove to not be as successful or needed as once before. MISSION: POSSIBLE AND NECESSARY Of course, there are priorities that seem to be more relevant occurring now in the United States. But space exploration should be seen in its overarching historical setting and its importance there rather than in the small-scale political-economic issues that are upfront. According to NASA’s budget as a percent of the federal budget by fiscal year, spending for space exploration has gone down from over four percent in 1967 to 0.5 percent of the federal budget by