With big spending coming from several countries per year on space travel, no country spends more than the United States. When the space shuttle program was active in the United States more than $196 billion on the space shuttle program over its lifespan (Wall). The total cost of the program over its life was supposed to be $90 billion for up to 50 launches per year. The highest amount of shuttle launches in any one year was only nine. Michael Griffin, NASA’s head administrator has came out and publically called the shuttle program a “mistake”.
While the Apollo programs went to the moon, America spent $196 billion in order to orbit the Earth more than 20,000 times, but never went anywhere new. Because of this fact, it left Americans uninterested in space travel with all of the effort and nothing to really show for it (Wall). This information comes from a source that for the most part doesn’t appear to have any bias against space or space exploration and simply reports economic data. The head administrator of NASA is a reputable source and him publicly denouncing the space shuttle exploration program reinforces the idea that it was waste of time and helps makes the case against space exploration stronger.
Another idea against space exploration is that humans should explore the planet they live on fully, before embarking on a quest to another planet. Specifically humans should focus more on ocean exploration over space exploration. The ocean produces 20% of the world’s protein supply, and 3 billion people rely on the ocean for their livelihood. The ocean also produces 70% of Earth’s oxygen (Richter). These statistics, to some ocean activists, mean that dangers like ocean acidification and climate change need our attention.
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However humans know very little about the vast oceans of the world. Despite covering about 65% of the world, humans have mapped out only 5% of the seafloor in great detail. Humans naturally have a desire to explore yet very little exploring has been done with oceans. Economically it is much cheaper than space travel, as one dive to the mariana trench costed $8 million dollars compared to $450 million dollars for one launch of a space shuttle in 2011. NOAA only has a budget of 23.7 million dollars per year to conduct research compared to the 3.8 billion that NASA gets (Richter). National geographic is a relatively reliable source of scientific information, giving this statistic credibility.
The way to do that is not to go charging off into Space, wasting unbelievable quantities of money in pursuit of some chimera that we might in one day come back with some valuable mineral. Science should be devoting the sorts of sums of money that it is pumping into space to working out how to manage the climate here on Earth.There has been research going on for 65 years into climate management. Humans are starting to have the knowledge on how to seed clouds and know how to make it rain when we want it to rain. Countries such as Russia and China have used this in the past. For example it does not rain on the Victory Day Parade in Russia and the Chinese used this piece of technology to prevent rain from ruining the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics..
So the technology for managing the weather is in place and could be researched further instead of researching space.The big elephant in the room in all this is the issue of population. We all know it will rise to 10 billion or so in the next few decades. The only way to reduce population is prosperity, because we prosperous countries do not breed so fast. Using weather technology to make it rain would allow it to rain in parts of the world where rain is scarce and food is impossible to grow because of it. Space funds could reallocate the funds to research the simple notion of making it rain where and when we want it.
References
- NASA official website
- Space.com
- Scientific American
- National Geographic
- New York Times – Space Section
- SpaceX official website
- NASA Mars Exploration Program
- International Space Station – CASIS
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)+
