Now that the Space Race is over, what is the point? Are we wasting our money? Should we cut their budget? When the cold war ended with the soviets in 1991, it sparked up a debate as to whether or not the funding for the National Aeronautics and space administration should be continued. Although it may seem like a simple fix, it has proved to be one of NASA’s greatest and most difficult challenges yet.
After witnessing the decline of new innovations by the world’s space programs since the ‘60s, he
Dukes 1 A 'marie S. Dukes October 11, 2017 English I PAP/A1 Hern Annotated Bibliography Hanbury,Robin,and Piers Bizony. “For and Against: Space Exploration.” Engineering and Technology Magazine. The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014. Web.
Introduction Once a government monopoly, today space travel has now been expanded to private corporations. The resulting pros and cons have left the international community with questions to answer and decisions to make on the use of private companies in space. The privatization of space endeavors have brought on exciting new opportunities.
NASA has shown that their programs provide positive economic returns to society. Wallace Fowler, professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, avows, “It is estimated that the total economic benefit of each dollar spent on the space program has been between eight to ten dollars”. Fowler contrasts this return with other common expenditures, stating “Compare that to Americans spending more than $35 billion a year on pizza or the national total annual economic cost of tobacco exceeding $250 billion and you can see that our return on our NASA investment is rather high” (Fowler). Fowler makes a strong case for further investment in NASA as a way to generate positive economic outcomes. Furthermore, Fowler’s argument also demonstrates that even though NASA’s budget in 2015 was estimated at $17.5 billion, the monetary returns exceeded its spending.
There have been a series of arguments on whether to fund money more on space exploration to explore what is out there or, to find a solution to world hunger and poverty. Indeed space exploration does have it’s own indirect benefits, it's still filled with uncertainty. As world famine has become a growing complication (along with several other factors), riot and uncivilization is inevitable. Therefore, if the government had to make the choice in funding only one of the projects, the most logical project to finance and support would be the termination of famine in our society. When the Australian lab discovered proof of advanced alien life on a planet similar to Earth, a large portion of this remains unrevealed.
Colonizing Mars Mars is often voted by people as being the most likely place for humans to colonize after we are done with Earth. This is often said because of Mars’s similar size to Earth and similar climate. However, Mars might not be the best place to go when we decide to make our first extra-terrestrial home. Whether you believe we should colonize another planet or not, evidence proves that moving to Venus is both logical and cost effective. There is much more promise in visiting Venus and much more we can learn.
Is it ethical to spend $330 billion on space exploration every year when there are so many issues on Earth that can not be solved due to lack of funds? Space research has definite benefits and has led to many useful discoveries, however there are many ethical drawbacks. We need to reassess our priorities. What should we really be putting our money towards? : world hunger, protecting the environment, and education or space exploration.
A very controversial subject today is astronautics, e.g. space travel. I believe that, even though being rather expensive, it still enables us to reach our frontier in every aspect of technology there is. In the future, we should continue to further fund space programs around the globe. One of the main reasons space travel is so important for us to continue exploring space is that on our advance to a new space object we must overcome so many hurdles and refine so many technologies, that we have furthered the progress of all technological frontiers by the time we finally made it to a new stellar object.
The importance of space travel was debatable, but has become controversial in recent times. The substantial influence of spending money over space travel or climate has sparked the debate over the potential impact of this trend. Some audiences conjecture that space travel is imperative; on contrary, some people assert that government must focus on burning issues prevail in our planet like global warming. I tend to believe that we must initially resolve our current problems than spend money on luxuries like space travel. At the outset, there are innumerable reasons to agree with that we need to put our environmental issues on priority but the most conspicuous one lies in the fact that our climate is deteriorating day by day.
The planet that we call home is dying, and we haven't done much to prevent it. Researchers at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have realized that there is no way to save it, so they have resorted to looking for a new planet to inhabit. A major issue with colonizing on other planets is food. Since plants cannot grow on other plants in our solar system, and we have not learned how to travel interstellar, NASA is developing a system to farm in space. Space farming is going to be a critical part of our future, and expanding our reach throughout the solar system.
