The Pros And Cons Of NASA

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Wasteful, useless, pointless – and many more colorful words have been used to describe the budget allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States, NASA. You could almost make 24 stacks of one-dollar bills tall enough to reach space with the $17.5 billion that were budgeted this year alone. It’s a staggering amount at first glance I’ll admit, but there is so much more return in NASA’s work that many fail to see. NASA is known mostly for its achievements in space exploration, but positive ripples from the effects of its breakthroughs have touched so many different industries in our country. In fact, since 1976 NASA has been publishing an annual publication called “SpinOff” highlighting what is defined as “A commercialized product incorporating NASA technology or expertise that benefits the public” (Lockney). Republican lawmakers have been attacking this subject for some time now. During this time of wide budget cuts, NASA’s budget has remained relatively stable. Departments such as Transportation, Treasury and the Department of the Interior already have considerably smaller budgets and are subject to significant cuts to reduce the deficit. They argue that, NASA should be subject to same cuts as all the other departments according to the Budget Control Act of 2011 (Moskowitz). If NASA’s funding would be reduced, the effects would hinder advances in areas such as public safety, transportation, energy, environment, even industrial productivity. Let’s look at the cold hard numbers to start. In the last ten years, NASA has managed to: create 18,000 jobs, save 444,000 lives, reduce costs by $4.9 billion, and generate $5.1 billion in revenue. If that doesn’t start to make you feel good about NASA, try... ... middle of paper ... ... dollars; they’ve been keeping our society up with the times. Actually, they’ve been keeping us ahead of the times. America is the home of innovation and advancement and NASA is at the forefront of that. Again, I’ll agree that the budget is a large amount, but Michael Griffin, former NASA administrator said it best during a presentation to aerospace leaders in 2009; “What we do is huge, and we do it for chump change – less than the annual market for pizza,” the pizza market at the time being $27 billion (Spires). Space exploration benefits everyone. I’ll leave you with this to consider the next time you’re waiting for your GPS app to load on your phone, (brought to you by NASA technology). The moon is an abundant source of Helium-3. Helium-3 produces a clean nuclear reaction – no toxic waste. Why would you want to reduce funding to an organization researching this?

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