NASA Budget Essay

According to the United States government website on spending, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was allocated $32.35 billion of the U.S. budget, a statistic which has been increasing each of the past 5 years and is planned to continue increasing—by 6%, going into 2024 (Dreier). Space exploration is a venture which is indubitably accompanied by a wide variety of implications. The practice requires great amounts of funding, and, thus, has the potential to stir large amounts of controversy. In an age of increasing dedication to investment in voyages into space, it is necessary to pose the question: Should we, as a society, focus our fiscal and scientific efforts on space exploration. While the question cannot be answered

Given the above fact that $32.35 billion was allocated to NASA for its use, it is clear that significant funding is being funneled into increased space exploration. One issue that could be more directly addressed with such money is that of world hunger, which could be greatly remedied, if not eradicated, if donor governments provided around $37 billion a year (Oxfam). This is only $4.65 billion more than NASA’s budget, and with NASA’s budget increasing, this goal is not out of sight. Moreover, the crisis of climate change is a pressing issue that threatens each and every one of the resources we rely on. The increased emphasis on colonization of space, particularly by such notable billionaires as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, has been thought of as a way to potentially escape the climate crisis by residing on planets like Mars. This, however, works against the interests of the vast majority of Earth’s residents—particularly in the sense that this venture worsens the preexisting issues of climate change. Large amounts of carbon dioxide are released with each rocket launch, further trapping heat in our atmosphere and leading eventually to increases in the global temperature. One approach to addressing the climate crisis is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels for energy production and substitute those fossil fuels for sources of energy that are

Increased funding for space exploration would, thus, mean “prioritizing novelty over the immediate needs of actual people on our planet” (Johansen). With this increased interest in a more privatized approach to space exploration comes the risk of increased commercialization, and while space may seem to be a vast, even infinite, resource, room—especially within Earth’s orbit—is, in fact, limited. While 11,000 satellites have been launched since 1957, in the coming decades, seven times that number are set to be. This greatly increases the risk of overcrowding and collisions in our atmosphere (Broom), a definitively counterproductive route to take if the goal of space travel in any case is to better explore