Should Space Exploration Needs To Be Publicly Funded Essay

Why NASA and Space Exploration Needs to be Publicly Funded

Exploration has been a staple in the history of humans as long as we’ve been a civilization. The only reason that we are where we are as a civilization is because of exploration, pushing the boundaries of the unknown and discovering more. If exploration is responsible for doing all that, why would we just give up on pushing the next boundary, space. We’ve made a lot of advancements in space exploration such as; going to the moon, launching satellites, establishing space stations, and even creating things like the Hubble telescope that takes breathtaking pictures every day. We’ve put so much time and effort into learning about the universe surrounding us, which is why I believe space exploration must be publicly funded so we can try and push forward in order to fully explore the cosmos.

Since civilization was first conceived humans have learned about the world around us by exploring. We weren’t thrown into this world to stay in one single location, we spread out and discovered the world. If we established ourselves on earth by exploring then why should we stop now? Back in the 1400’s China was an extremely powerful country, their “state revenues were probably 100 times Portugal’s”(Dunbar, Brian). Even though they

were such a prosperous country they aren’t the ones that explored the world. With all their state revenue they were busy building a wall to block themselves off from the outside threats while the Portuguese and other countries discovered the rest of the world. By 1470 China had to deal with the repercussions of sealing their borders, they struggled with things that before they could do with ease such as build the huge ships that they used before. Not being able to build ships they were unable to easily trade with other countries dooming themselves for years to come. If we begin to trap ourselves while other countries begin to dabble in space exploration with more determination than we are, we will be dooming ourselves like China did, not being able to help in world efforts and setting ourselves behind everyone else.
Increasing the budget for something such as space exploration that is already an astronomically high amount of money does have some controversy.

The biggest controversy with it is why bother with it, we have enough problems on the ground and we can’t afford to waste valuable resources on something that could possibly lead to nowhere. A lot of complaints revolve around better ways to use the resources that are being put into space exploration. While there are a lot of problems going on just about everywhere on the planet such as; war, ocean pollution, droughts, and famine; I don’t believe the solution to all of those problems lies in gutting the space program, I think the solution lies

elsewhere.
To fully understand the money that’s going into NASA’s budget, we have to look at the US Federal Budget for 2016. The federal budget puts everything that the US government is putting money into for 2016 fiscal year, this year's budget is 4.1 trillion dollars. The program that will be receiving the most money on the budget is Health Care, with its budget being over 1.1 trillion dollars. That is just about one fourth of the entire budget, to put that into perspective, the amount of money being put into the Science, Space, and Technology programs is just about 31 billion dollars. That sounds like a crazy amount of money but in actuality it’s less than a percent of the national budget. Something as vague as ‘Other Government Programs’ receives 5 billion dollars more than the space program does. Out of every tax dollar paid NASA receives about .005% of the dollar. Why point out the one of lowest things on the federal budget for wasting money and resources when it’s budget is already hanging by a thread.
With the amount of money that is put into NASA it’s quite amazing the things that they are able to get done. The things that they’ve accomplished in just the last year are astounding, they managed to get a spacecraft called the New Horizons all the way to Pluto (which is about 4.67 billion miles away from Earth) and capture “never-before-seen views of the distant dwarf planet and its moons”(NASA Reaches New Heights in 2015). Also the NASA kepler spacecraft discovered an Earth size planet that seems possibly habitable that’s near a star like our own Sun that is about 1,400 light years away. And the biggest thing that they did this last year would be discovering liquid water flowing on the surface of Mars, that can mean that there is potential life on Mars. These are the discoveries that they found in terms of space exploration, they may not be important as of this instant but in the future they may save us as a species. Funding NASA isn’t only for space exploration though, they’ve made forms of technology that have been used to further space exploration, but also help people on Earth.
NASA is mostly known for its endeavors in space but they’ve also helped a lot with day to day things that you wouldn’t attribute to them. One such thing would be its helping in the research for artificial limbs, due to the innovations in robotics and shock absorption materials they’ve helped create newer and better prostheses; they’ve also helped make prosthetics that look and feel more flesh like due to their temper foam technology. They’ve also helped out with major things like water purification, its purpose is to give people living on the ISS (International Space Station) a source of clean water from things like “wastewater from respiration, sweat, and urine into drinkable water”(NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives). The use that it could have to the public would be to give people a way to have access to clean and affordable water. These are just a couple of examples on how NASA’s work towards space exploration is helping people on Earth.
One of the biggest reasons NASA does everything they do is for the future. When they discover water on Mars they don’t believe that in that instant Mars can be colonized; but what it does is opens a door for them to research ways to make that future a possibility. If NASA can get proper funding the possibilities are endless, we may have a world where our civilization isn’t only on Earth, but potentially spread throughout various planets. We would be able to get a full understanding of the universe we live in. In our universe we live in one galaxy surrounded by billions of other galaxies that vary in size, but in every galaxy there are billions or trillions of planets, we are in “a universe filled with 1024 planets”, or around 1 septillion different planets out there; and the only planets we know really well are the other 7 in our solar system (Siegel, Ethan). A future where we’re able to learn about even a percent of those planets would be amazing. It may not seem possible at all right now but we as the human race have done incredible things, going to the moon back in 1969 must’ve seemed completely impossible but we did it. The point is if we actually try to accomplish this then we just may be able to do it.
Space exploration must continue being publicly funded if we hope to continue on as a civilization. Looking back at history exploration has pushed successful countries to be successful; and if we choose to follow in histories wrongdoings by stopping public funding we’ll be doomed to repeat them. The controversy that space exploration brings up doesn’t bring up actual wrongdoings on NASA it points out the wrongs that lie in the federal budget. As a civilization

we should do everything in our power to prosper; and by ending the public funding you would stop us from reaching our full potential.