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But just because NASA is a small waste, or a waste among many, does not mean it isn’t waste, or that it should be ignored. Levinger argues that NASA is small potatoes, a mere drop in the bucket compared to, say, spending on the military. Feeding and clothing people might not be as sexy as space exploration, but in the broader picture it is a just and nobler goal.
#NASA BUDGET FULL#
Humanity deserves our full and undivided attention - no more playing golf on the moon or entertaining fanciful notions of putting men on Mars. Humanity deserves better than the continuation of an ill-advised space race with a geopolitical enemy that disappeared nearly two decades ago. But humanity deserves more than just the scraps of NASA’s occasional research.
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Even the most hard-hearted of critics must admit that the organization has chalked up many victories in the fight to improve the world. Something does not need to be a 100 percent complete and total waste in order to call it wasteful.
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For all the gains that NASA has made, its opportunity costs are far greater. Consider all of the research that our single MIT has produced during that period, all of the students taught and leadership provided. Over the past four decades, instead of NASA, we could have had at least six additional MIT’s. Think about it this way: MIT, from a mixture of tuition, government funding, and endowment payouts, spends $2.5 billion to keep itself running. Not only is it the case that research is a small component of NASA’s activities, but it should also be self-evident that had NASA’s budget been applied directly to the betterment of humanity, the direct gains of that spending would have outweighed the tangential gains from the occasional cross-utilization of space technology here on earth. Let us not buy into the delusion that all of the low-hanging fruit that NASA has picked over the years would have gone undiscovered forever, or that we would never have achieved satellites without luxuries such as the Apollo missions. But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that all of NASA’s budget can be recompensed by the occasional spin-offs from its R&D program. It is true, NASA research has led to many discoveries: Besides its many advances in satellites and computing, NASA can also claim credit for a host of more mundane things - quartz timing crystals, bar-code scanners, smoke detectors, cordless screwdrivers, and velcro. Proponents claim that on its route to the stars, NASA has completed research that has benefited the rest of mankind. Under the clouds of this space-industrial complex, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. It is spending the sweat of our laborers, the genius of our scientists, the hopes of our children. We house a handful of men in space with a year’s worth of housing for more than ten million U.S. We pay for a single shuttle launch with fifty million bushels of wheat. It is nine-hundred billion gallons of fresh drinking water produced by desalination. With apologies to Dwight Eisenhower, the cost of one modern space shuttle is this: one and a half million lives lost for wont of anti-malarial bed nets. We should also support Obama for his fiscal discipline in cutting what has been a horrendous waste of our society’s resources. The president is working hard to spin the upcoming change as a transition rather than a cut, and perhaps for good reason: He is unlikely to find a receptive audience in Florida, long a recipient of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s largess.īut while the swing-state politics of the Sunshine State may compel Obama to tread carefully, we as the general public should recognize this new policy for what it is: a dramatic reduction in human space exploration. If recent moves by the administration are any indication, this new vision will significantly curtail public funding for space activity. The White House has announced plans to host a conference in Florida on April 15 during which President Obama will unveil his vision for the U.S.