The Space Race

The main outreach of the United States government that explores new boundaries never touched before, invents products never thought possible before, and most importantly inspires people has had its budget slashed since its creation. In 1958, National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created in response to Sputnik, the first satellite launched by humans (Goldstein, 2007, p.1). Dwight D. Eisenhower did not want the United States to fall behind Russia in Aeronautics. This decision sparked what is known as the Space Race, within the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US. Ever since then NASA has never been viewed in the same light as it was when the space race was going on. Currently, it has had to take a back seat to some other

This was an enormous event in NASA history, their biggest accomplishment ever. A main player in the early history of NASA, was no other than John F. Kennedy. He delivered a motivating speech setting a goal most believed impossible. It gave people a goal to look forward to, a destination people want to help reach. NASA’s funding was at its peak when it accounted for 4.41% of the US federal budget, in the heat of the Cold War (Rodgers, 2010, p.1). It is very important to understand this because it reveals something interesting, that NASA was being used to help in war. As Goldstein (2007) explains, this is why they believe that funding for space exploration has decreased so much. Dr. Neil Tyson agrees with this in his book Space Chronicles: Facing The Ultimate Frontier. Ever since then NASA’s budget has been severely cut every year down to what it is today half a percent of the US budget (Zeller, 2014, p.1). NASA is not on the top of politicians priority list or the general public. According to a study, performed by Pew Research Center it found that people would like to do space travel but they do not want to pay the bill for it (Wormald, 2014, p.1). NASA started to get some backlash when they faced a setback, in the Challenger mission that blew up right after launch. Many people started to

Due to mismanagement NASA has fallen victim to an inefficient system, within the agency and within congress (Chapman, 2015, p.1). It has been hard for NASA to accomplish anything because of the every changing political overtone it faces, every year it has to go through the process of changing the budget. NASA due to this struggles with being able to put together anything consistent due to ever changing budgets and politics. Within NASA there are many issue, proponents of inefficiency argue. For example, Chapman (2015) reported that NASA spent 1.5 million dollars on creating a video game to replicate traveling to Mars and life on Mars. Many politicians did not like to see taxpayers money go to simulating what being on Mars would be equivalent to. Tom Coburn, a senator of Oklahoma is one of the believers that NASA is too inefficient with their funds (Chapman, 2015, p.1). This tends to be a popular opinion as many citizens widely believe that the government is very