In the hours after Curiosity launched last month, there were more than a few people questioning the worth of spending two and a half billion dollars to launch a spacecraft to Mars. This is absolutely a fair question to ask. It's important to place the question in context, because most people in the general public think NASA gets a much larger fraction of the U.S. budget than it actually does (people tend to think it gets five or even 15 or 20 percent of the budget, when the actual number is about 0.4 percent). Even though NASA is not as large a part of the budget as people think it is, it's irrefutable that $2,500,000,000 (the approximate total cost of Curiosity through its primary mission) or $17,800,000,000 (the fiscal year 2012 budget for all of NASA) is a lot of money that could pay for lots of other worthwhile things. I wondered how it compared to other discretionary expenses, so I checked. The 2012 budget for federal cultural grants agencies -- things like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian, and so on -- totals a little over $1,250,000,000, or about half …show more content…
"Hope" became a politically charged word in our last election, and that's too bad, because it's so important. Hope and confidence that the future will be better than the present have always been an important driver of American growth. Hope is what brought the first colonists to American shores, and hope is what continues to bring immigrants to the United States today. Hope for the future makes us want to contribute to the greater good, while lack of hope makes us selfish and defensive. Space exploration, especially human space exploration, has always been coupled to visions of a future filled with technological wonders, breathtaking vistas, and a home world more advanced than the one we live on now. We can't make all of those visions come true, but the ones we can achieve through our toil will make our children's lives better than