NASA, Government funding for

The government does not put a high enough priorty on space exploration and NASA should receive much more government funding in order to expand its crucial mission. Far from being pointless, NASA’s recent work has allowed mankind to explore the origins of the universe and our own planet’s formation. It has led the search for worlds around distant stars, where life might one day be found. And it continues to embrace the challenge of human spaceflight; manned missions have a flexibility and scope that robot probes will never deliver, and they can inspire and unite humanity in pursuit of a noble common cause.

Cutting NASA out of the federal budget, would only cut less than one percent of the total. Compare this to the 5% of the federal budget spent on NASA at the height of the Apollo missions to the moon and it is clear that its current programmes are affordable. Nor would scrapping NASA and spending its budget on social programmes make any great difference – the federal government alone spends nearly a hundred times more on social programmes than it does on NASA (and state and local governments spend tens of billions more tax dollars on similar programmes). So the impact on the poor from redirecting our space exploration budget would be less significant than a rounding error in federal accounting. By comparison, defence and homeland security spending is more than forty times NASA’s budget each year, so if the nation is to change its priorities that is clearly a better place to start.

Even if earth’s huge social and environmental problems could be solved simply by throwing more money at them, redirecting NASA’s small budget will make no real difference. In fact NASA makes a real contribution to solving the world’s problems by helping to expose and investigate the issues facing us. For example, NASA satellites provide critical data on problems such as the ozone layer or global warming, and they can expose illegal deforestation or track the progress of dangerous weather events such as hurricanes. More profoundly, NASA’s pictures from space of our beautiful Earth have changed human consciousness, bringing home to us our common destiny as shared inhabitants of a fragile planet. Nothing has done more to stimulate the growth of internationalism and environmental awareness.

NASA’s funding and management are not perfect, but that is a reason to reform them, not to abolish the agency altogether. Part of the reason the agency’s work is expensive is that it is both cutting-edge and concerned to minimise risk. Other countries’ space agencies and private companies may look more cost-effective, but that is because they are less ambitious, being largely content to replicate what NASA already achieved decades ago. They may also be prepared to tolerate more risk to their manned missions than NASA would. But with NASA’s commitment to the most challenging and innovative scientific missions comes economic benefits, as technological breakthroughs in materials, communications, imaging, and propulsion find new applications in civilian industries here in the USA.

NASA has always been committed to manned flight, so President Bush’s New Vision for Space Exploration was hardly imposed on the agency. Robot missions are fine for one-off, defined tasks, but they are not able to respond intelligently and flexibly to new situations in the way astronauts can. Manned missions can take on many more challenges (e.g. repairing and reconditinaing the Hubble space telescope); they also have huge importance in focusing the attention of mankind upon the mysteries of the universe and in inspiring millions of young people to become engineers and scientists. It is true there is a legitimate debate within the space community about manned vs unmanned missions, but few who wish to focus on unmanned spaceflight would want to shut NASA down. Instead they would like it to shift its priorities, generally into areas private space businesses are unlikely to venture.

In recent years many private sectors space companies have started up, which suggests that NASA is not preventing their growth. On the contrary, NASA’s investment in research and technology has stimulated an eco-system of space industries that continue to depend on it for trained personnel and scientific innovation. But these private efforts will never replace NASA’s role – they are only interested in the commercial opportunities of near-space, such as tourism or satellite launches. Private money will never wish to explore the solar system and answer the fundamental questions about the origins of the universe. For these, we have NASA.

The government should not be reliant on the private sector for its access to space. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, having a dedicated space agency continually expands the realm of the possible, allowing it to offer new data and propose new missions to government. Without NASA’s expertise, the government would not know how to approach space exploration, so private companies would not be offered any business anyway. Secondly and more importantly, control of space is now critical to our defence, with intelligence-gathering, communications and early warning satellites vital to the protection of American interests and the projection of its power. Not only should control of this part of our national security not be entrusted to private business, but defence considerations mean that NASA should continue to be well funded in order to ensure the USA continues to be the global leader in all space technology.