Space Travel
The Pros and Cons About Space Travel
pro

something good about space travel is that it increases our knowledge about outer space and our
own planet

If we find a habitable world it might slow down global worming

The more we go into space the more likely we are going to be able to start something like the
Stanford torus space station.

Through the exploration of space, we have the potential of discovering new resources such as
minerals that can have a major impact on improving quality of life on Earth

Exploring space helps us to understand our own planet and how we can preserve it better

The equipment we use in space seriously changes and advances technology and it is constantly
improving how we connect on a global scale.

The use of space equipment like satellites help us to predict weather patterns and by doing this,
it can help warn people before dangerous weather like tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes and
hurricanes happen

Space travel increases and drives the need for better technology such as smaller computers,
digital equipment and new forms of fuels

Increases global communication and cooperation (for example, the International Space Station).
con

some of the cons about space exploration is the natural resources such as fossil fuels used in
gasoline

The cost of space exploration and research is very expensive and there are many people who still
live in poverty and go hungry.

Travel into space is very dangerous and risky. The space shuttle Challenger killed seven
astronauts in the 1980s proving that it risks human life

We could possibly find something in space that is a risk to planet Earth. If aliens are real they
might destroy us and they might come to our planet and use our resources for their own purpose

Space junk is created by stuff we leave behind in space. Because there is no decomposition
process in outer space, this stuff stays and floats around forever.

Stuff may fall out of space and may not totally burn up in the atmosphere and can cause damage
when it lands on Earth and the radioactive parts can also contaminate our planet.

How can we be certain that the use of space travel will not be used in hostile intentions against
other countries?

May cause international tensions because one country may have the capacity to spy on another

May also cause problems because who has right to lay a claim on resources found in
space?
Pros and Cons of Space Exploration
Apr 25, 2014
62435
Space is one big mystery, very little is known. That's why we have space exploration,
but how beneficial is it?
Space exploration is almost like science fiction. The amount of space that is out there is
unimaginable, and discovering everything that exists would be nearly impossible. Space
exploration gives us a broader view of how big the universe that we live in actually is. It
helps us to understand different things, even about our own planet. Who knows, maybe one
day it will even come across valuable resources….or life.
The Pros of Space Exploration

The main advantage of space exploration is that it allows us to gain new information
about a much unknown place.

It is true that space exploration has the ability to resolve some of the mysteries that
enfold outer space.

Space exploration will also bring a dramatic change to the life of every individual on
Earth.

If you decided to explore the space, you will have a great chance to find out some
essential mineral and precious materials as well as creature like species that can be
found in the outer space.

You will also have the opportunity to find living things that were evolved and developed
in the outer space. It is a fact the exploring the space can lead to salient discovery of all
the valuable aspects in the world.

Space exploration is associated with adventure and most people really love adventure,
accepting challenges and making impossibilities possible.

Space exploration has the ability to satisfy the human desire for adventure.
The Cons of Space Exploration

The main disadvantages that you will encounter with space exploration are the amount
of money that you need to spend during the research process.

Instead of spending the money for space researches, they can use the money to reduce
the poverty in some of the underdeveloped nations.

Since the space exploration involves space technology and astronomy, it usually
requires a big amount of capital just to travel to space.

Aside from money matter, exploring the space can also risks the life of astronomers who
travel in the outer space. It is very normal that when they decided to travel to space,
they need to adjust with the unfriendly environment.
How Do You Feel about Space
Exploration?
It is a fact that space exploration requires a big amount of funds that will be utilized for the
journey of astronomers in the outer space. However, in the recent years, there is a huge
number of needy and poor people suffer from poverty. In this case, it is much advisable to make
use the money to help those poor people in a certain country than to spend the money in
exploring the space.
LOS ANGELES — As NASA plans to send astronauts on long missions to an asteroid
or even to Mars in the coming decades, the space agency must grapple with some
thorny moral questions: How do they handle decisions on long-distance space
exploration when it could endanger the health of the astronauts?
The space agency asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to offer guidelines to help
NASA make such health decisions as it ventures into this unknown territory. The results,
which were put together by a group of medical experts, were released Wednesday in a
187-page report.
Long spaceflights and exploration missions will "likely expose crews to levels of known
risks beyond those allowed by current health standards,” according to the report. Jeffrey
Kahn of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics led the team of authors.
Missions may include both extended stays on the International Space Station and long
missions to an asteroid or Mars.
The risks include radiation-induced cancers; loss of bone mass from long periods of
time spent in zero gravity; nausea or fatigue from extreme radiation if astronauts get hit
by a solar storm; and blurred vision.
And that’s just a short list of the health hazards that researchers are aware of, not even
counting the long-term psychological effect of dealing with stressful situations in a small
space. Many of the risks are still unknown and cannot even be predicted, the report
said.
Ethics Of Radiation Risks
Among the report’s recommendations: Avoid harm by keeping risks to astronauts to a
minimum. Make sure the benefits outweigh the risks enough for the mission to be
worthwhile. Operate in an open and accountable way, and keep astronauts informed of
the risks they face. Their basic message to NASA was: act in a responsible way and
don't try to hide anything.
As it stands, any sort of long-term space travel could very well take astronauts past the
current safe limits for radiation exposure, and this creates a problem for NASA. In 2011,
NASA sent a exploration rover, Curiosity, to Mars to send back information about the
red planet. A study that tracked the Curiosity rover’s radiation exposure on its way to
Mars, which took more than eight months, found that the round-trip journey could
potentially exceed the currently acceptable limits for astronauts.
Radiation in space comes from high energy particles. On Earth, there are strict limits
restricting a person's radiation exposure.
Scientists may have to figure out how to make the trip shorter or the spacecraft more
protective. Another option, as one scientist put it, would be to consider “reassessing
what level of risk we think is acceptable.”
So what does NASA do? Relax the current standards? Make a looser set of radiation
exposure standards for long-distance space missions? No go, the IOM report said.
Pushing The Boundaries
“The committee finds relaxing (or loosening) current health standards to allow for
specific long duration and exploration missions to be ethically unacceptable,” they
wrote.
The only way to allow for such missions ethically is to grant an exception to the rule on
a case-by-case level, they said.
“Exceptions to health standards should be considered on a mission-by-mission basis,"
the study authors wrote. The exceptions should only be used in very limited situations
and should follow the recommended guidelines.
Among its other considerations, the agency should also offer lifetime health care for its
astronauts, the experts said. They also have to take into account that different
astronauts may be able to tolerate different levels of risk. And they have to constantly
monitor the astronauts and collect as much health data as they can while also
protecting the astronauts' privacy.
In spaceflight, there always has been and will continue to be significant risk, the authors
pointed out.
From the beginning, "human spaceflight has pushed the boundaries of acceptable
health and safety risks for astronauts,” the study authors wrote.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF SPACE
EXPLORATION?
26 Jan , 2015 by Elizabeth Howell
Why explore space? It’s an expensive arena to play in, between the fuel costs and the
technological challenge of operating in a hostile environment. For humans, a small
mistake can quickly become fatal — something that we have seen several times in
space history. And for NASA’s budget, there are projects that come in late and over
budget, drawing the ire of Congress and the public.
These are some of the drawbacks. But for the rest of this article, we will focus on some
of the benefits of going where few humans have gone before.
Spinoffs
Perhaps the most direct benefit comes from technologies used on Earth that were first
pioneered in space exploration. This is something that all agencies talk about, but we’ll
focus on the NASA Spinoff program as an example. (NASA will be used as the prime
example for most of this article, but many of these cited benefits are also quoted by
other space agencies.)
The program arose from NASA’s desire to showcase spinoffs at congressional budget
hearings, according to its website. This began with a “Technology Utilization Program
Report” in 1973, which began as a black-and-white circular and progressed to color in
1976 following public interest. Since that year, NASA has published more than 1,800
reports on spinoffs.
The agency has several goals in doing this. “Dispelling the myth of wasted taxpayer
dollars” is one NASA cites, along with encouraging the public to follow space
exploration and showing how American ingenuity can work in space.
There are many commercialized advances the program says it contributed to, including
“memory foam” (first used for airline crash protection), magnetic resonance imaging and
smoke detection. In many cases, NASA did not invent the technology itself, but just
pushed it along, the agency says.
An MRI image of the lower back. Credit: NASA
But as counterpoint to NASA’s arguments, some critics argue the technology would
have been developed anyway without space exploration, or that the money spent on
exploration itself does not justify the spinoff.
Job creation
Another popularly cited benefit of space exploration is “job creation”, or the fact that a
space agency and its network of contractors, universities and other entities help people
stay employed. From time to time, NASA puts out figures concerning how many
associated jobs a particular project generates, or the economic impact.
Here’s an example: in 2012, NASA administrator Charles Bolden published a blog post
about the Curiosity Mars rover landing, which was picked up by the White House
website. “It’s also important to remember that the $2.5 billion investment made in this
project was not spent on Mars, but right here on Earth, supporting more than 7,000 jobs
in at least 31 states,” he wrote.
Hazcam fisheye camera image shows
Curiosity drilling into “Windjana” rock target on
April 29, 2014 (Sol 615). Flattened and
colorized image shows Mount Remarkable
butte backdrop. Credit: NASA/JPL/Marco Di
Lorenzo/Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com
But the benefit can cut in a negative way, too.
NASA’s budget is allocated by Congress,
which means that the amount of money it has
available for employment fluctuates. There are
also some programs that are highly dependent
on grants, which can make stable jobs
challenging in those fields. Finally, as the
priorities of Congress/NASA change, jobs can evaporate with it. One example was the
space shuttle’s retirement, which prompted a job loss so massive that NASA had a
“transition strategy” for its employees and contractors.
It’s also unclear what constitutes a “job” under NASA parlance. Some universities have
researchers working on multiple projects — NASA-related or not. Employment can also
be full-time, part-time or occasional. So while “job creation” is cited as a benefit, more
details about those jobs are needed to make an informed decision about how much
good it does.
Education
Teaching has a high priority for NASA, so much so that it has flown astronaut educators
in space. (The first one, Christa McAuliffe, died aboard the space shuttle Challenger
during launch in 1986. Her backup, Barbara Morgan, was selected as an
educator/mission specialist in 1998 and flew aboard STS-118 in 2007.) And to this day,
astronauts regularly do in-flight conferences with students from space, ostensibly to
inspire them to pursue careers in the field.
Christa McAuliffe and Barbara Morgan practice teaching from space. Credit: “The Lost
Lessons”
NASA’s education office has three goals: making the workforce stronger, encouraging
students to pursue STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and mathematics),
and “engaging Americans in NASA’s mission.” Other space agencies also have
education components to assist with requirements in their own countries. It’s also fair to
say the public affairs office for
NASA and other agencies play
roles in education, although they
also talk about topics such as
missions in progress.
But it’s hard to figure out how well
the education efforts translate into
inspiring students, according to
a National Research Council
report on NASA’s primary and
secondary education program in 2008. Among other criticisms, the program was cited
as unstable (as it needs to change with political priorities) and there was little “rigorous
evaluation” of its effectiveness. But NASA’s emphasis on science and discovery was
also praised.
Anecdotally, however, many astronauts and people within NASA have spoken about
being inspired by watching missions such as Apollo take place. And the same is true of
people who are peripherally involved in the field, too. (A personal example: this author
first became interested in space in the mid-1990s through the movie Apollo 13, which
led to her watching the space shuttle program more closely.)
New Rosetta mission findings do not exclude comets as a source of water in and on the
Earth’s crust but does indicate comets were a minor contribution. A four-image mosaic
comprises images taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera on 7 December from a
distance of 19.7 km from the centre of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. (Credit:
ESA/Rosetta/Navcam Imager)
Intangible benefits
Added to this host of business-like benefits, of course, are the intangibles. What sort of
value can you place on better understanding the universe? Think of finding methane on
Mars, or discovering an exoplanet, or
constructing the International Space
Station to do long-term exploration
studies. Each has a cost associated with
it, but with each also comes a smidgeon
of knowledge we can add to the
encyclopedia of the human race.
Space can also inspire art, which is
something seen heavily in 2014 following
the arrival of the European Space
Agency Rosetta mission at Comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It
inspired songs, short videos and many other works of art. NASA’s missions, particularly
those early space explorers of the 1950s and 1960s, inspired creations from people as
famous as Norman Rockwell.
There also are benefits that maybe we cannot anticipate ahead of time. The Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a network that advocates looking for life around the
universe, likely because communicating with beings outside of Earth could bring us
some benefit. And perhaps there is another space-related discovery just around the
corner that will change our lives drastically.
For more information, here is a Universe Today article about how we really watched
television from the moon. We also collected some spin-offs from the Hubble Space
Telescope. You can also listen to Astronomy Cast. Episode 144 Space Elevators.
Engineering and Technology Magazine
WEBINARS
Debate
For and Against: Space exploration
For
Investing in further scientific exploration of space is a waste of resources
Author, explorer and campaigner
Robin Hanbury-Tenison's Profile
Robin OBE, was named by the Sunday Times as one of the ‘greatest explorers of the 20th century’. A passionate
campaigner on environmental and human rights issues, he has been on over 30 expeditions, including as leader of
the Royal Geographical Society’s largest expedition to the rainforests of Sarawak. This and his book, ‘Mulu: The
Rainforest’, started the international concern for tropical rainforests.
The amount of money being spent on space research is in the billions and it has achieved extraordinarily little except
for a bit of improved technology which would probably have come about anyway by other means. Whether or not
global warming is real, and whether or not we are facing imminent catastrophe on this planet, we are certainly facing
serious issues here on Earth, and they are getting worse as we simply watch them. These include the disappearance
of the rainforest, the pollution of the oceans, and increased desertification of an area about the size of England every
year. These are the general crises that are coming to the planet, quite apart from the economic ones we’re so
obsessed with at the moment.
I have for some time considered space research a gross waste of money, time and effort that could be much better
applied to the management of our own planet. I’m currently writing a book about what remains of the Central
American rainforest of the Petén and looking at ways of protecting it. But the only way you can really protect
rainforest, and I’ve been trying to do this for 40 years, is to make it more valuable standing than cut. The Petén is
interesting because this is where the Maya were. Their civilisation collapsed in about 900AD because they overexploited their environment.
We know that all civilisations collapse after about 500 years, prior to which you have big cities, people in the
countryside servicing the cities. But inevitably the greed of development leads to the extinction of a culture. This is
exactly what is happening to us today. We’re experiencing climate change, famine, drought, warfare and we’re
investing money needed to solve these problems in Space.
If the collapse of civilisations is a recurrent theme, then at we should be looking for ways of managing the planet’s
resources in order to make how we live sustainable. The way to do that is not to go charging off into Space, wasting
unbelievable quantities of money in pursuit of some chimera that we might in one day come back with some valuable
mineral. Science should be devoting the sorts of sums of money that it is pumping into space to working out how to
manage the climate here on Earth.
There has been research going on for 65 years into climate management. We know how to seed clouds and we know
how to make it rain when we want it to rain. The Chinese and the Russians are very switched on to this and they
know how to do it. The Chinese used it to prevent rain during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing
Olympics, and it never rains on the Victory Day Parade in Russia. So the technology for managing the weather is in
place and I think we should devote massive resources to developing that technology and taking it from the military
into the civilian world.
The big elephant in the room in all this is the issue of population. We all know it will rise to 10 billion or so in the next
few decades. The only way to reduce population is prosperity, because we prosperous countries do not breed so fast.
The way to do that is to give people enough to eat. The way to do that is to make it rain. We should reallocate the
funds currently being spent on Space research to the rather simple notion of making it rain where and when we want
it.
Now there will be pro-space lobbyists who agree with every word of this, but will complain that I want to take
their money off them. But there isn’t enough money to go around. In terms of expenditure on weather management
since the Second World War there’s only been tens of millions spent on research – as opposed to tens of billions on
space research.
If you put the money that is wasted in space into the hands of climatologists you could have lasting benefits for
mankind. I don’t think space science is bad science, I just think it’s a waste of time.
Against
Investing in further scientific exploration of space is a good use of resources
that will ultimately help to stimulate global economies
Author, journalist and filmmaker
Piers Bizony's Profile
Piers is an author, journalist and filmmaker specialising in aerospace and cosmology and has been shortlisted for the
Nasa/Eugene M Emme Award for Astronautical Writing. He has written several books, the most recent of which is
‘Starman’, the definitive biography of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
We’re living in a tremendously virtual age where many young people think that all of the discoveries that they need to
make will happen on their laptops and smartphones. For me, it’s more important than ever to reintroduce a sense of
physical exploration, to get out there into strange, hostile and challenging environments. There is probably 99 per
cent of deep oceans and all of space to left explore, and it is only by putting humans into new physical locations that
we’ll be able to make genuine and crucial scientific discoveries. Human presence in science is almost the definition of
science. It’s a human endeavour to gather knowledge, not just a machine endeavour to gather data. The robots we
send into these environments don’t know what to look for, and above all they don’t know how to be surprised by
something like the strange glint of a rock.
Some will say that we’re in the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s and we simply don’t have spare pocket
money for this. But, the first thing to remember when looking at the recent announcement that Nasa is to put $1.6bn
into a project to get its astronauts up the International Space Station, is that this is actually not a very large sum of
money.
Besides, one of the most successful responses to the Great Depression of the 1930s was to pump money into
infrastructure and technology – it was called Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was controversial at the time, but by the end of
that decade, the USA was the most powerful nation on Earth. What are governments for if they don’t invest? It’s
much better to put taxpayers’ money into jobs and new technologies than simply bailing out banks.
The benefits of continuing to conduct off-world scientific exploration in the short term are Earthly. They have to do
with forging new and unprecedented diplomatic relationships between countries, while getting engineers with different
backgrounds and traditions to work together.
It also ensures the development of a good technology base, not only among companies, but among young people
who need something to inspire them through the educational system. These people are more likely to be interested in
building a space ship than something less glamorous. Space science also keeps coming up with new challenges in
terms of materials, communications and so on. Solving these challenges feeds back into the terrestrial economy.
People are under the illusion that investing in rockets involves little more than sticking money into the pipe and then
setting fire to it. But that’s not at all the case. The money gets circulated here on the ground. There has never been a
space programme that hasn’t been a good economic stimulus.
What the current team of scientists is doing at the moment is developing a framework to teach us how to maintain a
long-term presence in space. It started with how to build structures in space, and they’re now beginning to conduct
scientific experiments up there. It has taken some time for the science to feed back to us, but this is because
constructing the Space Station itself has been complicated.
The short cycle of governments means that it’s not always in their interest to look to the long term. But when there are
international alliances it’s harder for any given government to withdraw from projects and ruin everything for everyone
else. Nasa called in international allies to help to justify it and in so doing put itself in a position where it didn’t want to
disappoint any of those allies by cancelling large chunks of the programme. It’s these alliances that are the key to
ensuring the long-term potential for space exploration.
And so the question of investment in space isn’t one of throwing good money after bad. In terms of science, 99.999
per cent of all that we need to know is off-world. It’s inconceivable that we don’t send more human beings out there to
find out more about it.
Debate: Is space exploration a waste
of resources?
Sian Meaney and Tom Robinson debate whether the money and time
expended on space exploration could be put to better use elsewhere
Sian Meaney, Tom Robinson on Saturday 8th November 2014
Photograph: WikiImages
YES
Sian Meaney
Like most people, I have a great desire to learn about the wonders of the world in which we
live. However, I also have a deep respect for human life and an understanding that ensuring
a high quality of life for those around us is far more important than satiating curiosity about
any topic, including space. The exploration of space not only exhausts resources that could
be better used elsewhere, but also implies that the welfare of those around us is of less
importance than exploring the unknown.
This debate is provoked by the recent Virgin Galactic crash, which resulted in the fatality of
one pilot and the serious injury of another. Writing about the incident in a blog-post, Richard
Branson stated that “every new transportation system has to deal with bad days” and that
“space is hard — but worth it”. Is it really “worth it” though? Our hyper-commercialized world
is one in which the loss of life and millions of pounds worth of technology is described as a
“bad day” rather than a disaster.
However, though this commercial venture displays much that is wrong with our attitude to
space exploration, I feel that it is more important to focus on trips funded or subsidised by
taxpayers’ money, as these most directly detract from public spending.
Space exploration is a legitimate enterpise — but the needs of humanity should take
precedence over its desires. We need to look after our planet and combat the multitude of
prob- lems threatening our ecosystem: the disappearance of the rainforest, global warming,
and the pollution of the oceans.
Rather than looking to the stars, we ought to look around us and focus on solving problems
facing our generation and those to come.
We ought to consider those suffering from starvation before spending millions of pounds on
the small chance of learning something new. I realise this is unfeasible — but it does put
things in perspective. As President Eisenhower once said, “Every rocket fired signifies, in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are
not clothed.”
I acknowledge that space exploration has led to the creation of beneficial technologies. I’m
grateful for Velcro, I really am. However, we could gain more by focusing our energies on
creating things that directly benefit us, or directly alleviate urgent problems, at a fraction of
the cost.
Moreover, we often lose the money and resources that we send into space: the history of
failed missions to Mars dates back 40 years and includes the $165m Mars Polar Lander
and the $125m Mars Climate Orbiter.
Space exploration is heralded as a way to gain scientific knowledge. However, the majority
of NASA’s spending on research is ground-based. China has made no claims to scientific
benefit from manned missions, and neither has Russia in recent years. This provokes the
question “Why not focus on unmanned missions instead?”
My answer: because this too is a waste of resources. Areas of our plan- et are still relatively
unknown, areas we know contain a wealth of life. Our seabed is relatively unexplored, as is
Antarctica.
We also ought to question whether space exploration is really about the accumulation of
knowledge. The most articulate opposition to the Apollo missions came from Nobel
scientists, who objected to the cutting of their budgets to fund what DeGroot has labelled an
“ego trip to the moon”.
China’s manned programme was intended to challenge publicly the US domination of
space, while Bush’s pledge to boost spending on NASA and restart the manned mission to
Mars (priced at $400 billion) was a political response to this.
Does the loss of human life and the expenditure of billions of dollars on an ego trip
constitute a waste of resources? I think so.
NO
Tom Robinson
At the dawn of the space age, people lived in fear as Russia and the USA vied for military
and technological dominance. As astronauts sped away from Earth, humanity was
reminded of the very real capacity we had to destroy each other. If we could send men to
the stars, we could certainly fire nuclear warheads around the globe.
But during this time, we discovered phenomenal things through space exploration. We were
reminded of just how boundless human creativity and ingenuity could be.
Just three decades after a war had ended in which planes were built from donated pots and
pans, we had landed humans on the moon and brought them back safely. We had done so
on the back of human intellect alone, unaided by subsequent scientific developments in the
past four decades.
Space exploration is not a waste of resources, if only because it serves to give humanity a
vision, to make us take note of just how incredibly far we have come and how far we still
have to go.
Of course, people will argue that we have our priorities wrong. Space exploration, one could
argue, is a luxury that can ill be afforded when people are suffering unnecessarily from
diseases, research into which is under-funded. Wasteful when, as happened last week,
scientific equipment and supplies, weighing 5000 pounds in total, were destroyed by a
malfunction. Irresponsible when the gasses the rockets emit contribute to global warming.
I recognise and understand the importance of all of these issues, yet I still want space
exploration to continue. When children sat and watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
step out from the lunar module, a generation of scientists was inspired. And when those
people went on to create the Curiosity rover, currently roaming on the surface of Mars
beaming back the most detailed pictures of the Martian surface we’ve ever seen, another
generation was made.
Who knows what they might do? Could they be the scientists to establish colonies on the
Moon, the generation to mine vital resources from outer-space?
The Universe is vast and complex, which is why space exploration is such an effective
means of inspiring future generations to contribute to human understanding and
development.
Whilst it is disappointing when we lose scientific equipment and other resources due to
malfunctions, it is also a crucial part of the learning process. We may have failed to
send this rocket into space, but we’ll learn from it how to send countless more there
successfully.
And it is this challenge, the fact that it is not easy to explore space, which drives us to do
exactly that. Humanity has always strived to venture into the unexplored, find new
phenomena, new ways of improving our lives.
Space is no different. There are asteroids full of materials that can be mined without
polluting the atmosphere and damaging the livelihood of others. And so many technologies,
developed initially for space travel, have become central to how we live on Earth: safer,
faster aeroplane travel, better housing insulation, fire- resistant materials, artificial limbs,
robotics and so on.
If we can explore space, harness what it has to offer, and develop new technologies in the
process, then we’ll be contributing rather than wasting resources.
Space exploration cannot be seen as a waste of resources. It is at least a means of testing
and refining technology that, in fact, provides the resources we need to improve our lives
and those of future generations.
More importantly than this, though, is that space exploration inspires us. As the International
Space Station orbits above us, we are reminded that when collectively we act together,
there is little we cannot do. That symbolism is priceless.