On Space and Continuity
There are few things mankind can hold inherently to themselves by nature and possibly the most insurmountable of these evolutionary urges is the drive to explore everything there is to be stumbled upon. When we think of all the frontiers of Earth we as a species have conquered, we always seem to raise the question for ourselves, “What next?”. Most everyone would answer that question: “Space, of course… The final frontier”. When I was young, my family and I would routinely gather around the television around 4 in the morning to watch shuttle launches out of Cape Canaveral. I was inspired, just as many other kids around the world, watching the crews that had trained their whole lives, both mentally and physically, pile into the small cramped space known as the orbital capsule that sat upon millions of gallons of liquid nitrogen. You can’t help but be compelled to the point of sheer awe watching these individuals lay their lives on the line in pursuit of knowledge, adventure, and the ever-present stubbornness of their own curiosity. Many, however, do not wish to see this program to continue in lieu of other fields for the government to fund with the money once allocated to space research. I argue that the many benefits to technology, science, and foreign relations make the space program and its’ respective agency well worth the funding and should always find its’ way into the national budget. What reservations may opponents of space travel have that would drive them to slash funding from such a noble pursuit?
Many opponents of funding the Space Program would argue that we shouldn’t fund exploration of cosmic activities and go venturing off into the galaxy when there are so many problems here on Earth to take care of first. This logic is fallacious to me. Would we cut funding to our cities because there was so much work to be done on our backyards? Even more apt; would we cut funding to traveling and exploring the world when there were so many problems in our own countries? I posit that not and many of us wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors had adopted such an isolationist mentality. As Brian Wang, Executive journalist at futurology and science journal Next Big Future argues: “there has never ever been a historical example of a nation or sovereign government “solving their problems” before embarking on a major exploration like the major exploration that is presenting itself to us in the opportunity that is the space sector. The biggest problem of the space agency is no fault of their own but due, in large part, to a critical miscalculation of the public attention span.
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There are plenty of research opportunities that lend themselves only to Space Exploration that most, including myself, take for granted on a daily basis. In addition, there is are inherent values to this research being conducted by our space program both inside and outside of Earth’s atmosphere. As Mark Whittington, author of Why Is It So Hard to Get Back to The Moon? exclaims in The Examiner: “Inherent in exploration of all types is the opportunities that it opens up to the people doing the exploring. For some it is the opportunity to gain new knowledge. For others it is the opportunity to create wealth and expand commerce. For others, still, the opportunity lies is transcendence, to grow spiritually and to gain a greater appreciation of the universe.”There are indeed opportunities to take advantage of in basically every conceivable sector when it comes to Space exploration and to leave that vein largely untapped goes against our very nature as a species. There are also plenty of lessons that can be learned from past under-performing nations like China in the 1400’s that had an entire ocean going fleet that the emperor subsequently had destroyed in favor of an isolationist policy that left them vulnerable to European colonialism during that same century. And again when America operated on an isolationist policy during the early years of World War 2 only to be blindsided and forced into the war. In hindsight, not much good has ever come from settling down and focusing on internal problems in lieu of external opportunities and ventures.
It’s very easy for a scientist or just someone interested in space to justify to themselves, sometimes without words, what would benefit us from exploring the far reaches of space. It’s just a romantic idea that captures the wildest imaginations of the most ingenious people around the world and inspires beneficial foreign policy. In fact, the international Space Station is funded and promoted by 8 nations in camaraderie with one another. This romanticism and over-indulgence in the idea of Space has led many proponents to take its’ secondary objectives for granted. That is to say that those who don’t necessarily support space exploration have raised the question of what overall goals and research can be done in the coming years to make funding the space program a profitable venture. Arguments have been made that the space program has largely just been used as a tool for public morale and an industry for hashing out political beef especially early in its’ inception. Conservationist and author Robin Hansbury even goes on to say that, since its’ inception, the space program has achieved extraordinarily little. Because of this, it can be asserted that the money spent on many projects of the space program (See space shuttle and the International Space Station) have under-delivered as far as the money that has been spent on them goes. We must focus on dropping the cost of these ventures to allow the ideas proposed by many of our space entrepreneurs to settle in much better with opponents of the space exploration.
Not the least vocal of these opponents are the proponents of conservation. People who take issue with the funds allocated to the space program because they feel that these funds would better be invested in programs dedicated to more sustainable living on the planet we call home. This is not an invalid criticism but it’s neither a strong decry of the space program. NASA has an allotted budget of 0.4% of the national budget with many of its own projects dedicated to the conservationist efforts (Satellite imaging, weather and climate graphing) that it is so criticized for. To give context, the military, America’s most well-funded sector, receives 54% of the discretionary spending budget but even the army invests a large percentage of their funds in conservation research and more sustainable practices. Our biggest expenditure, as a nation, comes from bailing out major financial firms who screwed up the numbers and investing money in monopolistic practices like big oil who have both, historically, done little to support conservation and, on countless number of occasions, have proven very inhibitive of conservation. From a very ethical point of view, conservationists and Earth-minded individuals are not properly prioritizing their competition for funds. It’s interesting that anyone could find room to criticize the slim stipend that the space agency is allocated when there is such excess in expenditures in virtually every other major sector.
