Statement of Case
In 1958, President Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration to aid our country in the “space race” against the Soviet Union. Over the next
decade, NASA developed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects, the latter sending man to
the moon for the first time on July 20, 1969. Since setting foot on the moon, NASA has
continued to expand knowledge about space through the space shuttle, the International Space
Station, the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the Terra and Aqua satellites. The four divisions of
NASA are Aeronautics, Exploration Systems, Science, and Space Operations.
In 2004, President George W. Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration. He
plans to return the space shuttle to flight and retire it by 2010, complete the International Space
Station, begin robotic missions to the moon by 2008, return people there by 2020, and develop a
Crew Exploration Vehicle to send people beyond low earth orbit (Bush). Once his vision is
complete, we can consider more lofty goals, like eventually setting foot on Mars.
Currently, the 2007 fiscal budget proposed for NASA is $16.8 billion, a 3.2 percent
increase from the 2006 budget. President Bush has asked for an additional one billion dollars
over the next five years to help accomplish his goals. Of the budget, $724 million goes towards
aeronautics research, $5.3 billion towards NASA’s science missions, and $500 million towards
cross-agency support programs which deal with education, commercial leverage, and the
management of finances.
Some people fully support the NASA’s big plans for the future.
They believe that further space exploration would lead to exciting discoveries that will inspire
young children and adults alike. Every new finding of NASA leads to a sense of pride and
patriotism for our country’s dedicated space program. The technology developed through NASA
exploration “will pay back incalculable dividends to everyone on Earth during the coming
decades” (Eicher). According to these people, NASA’s budget, though high, is well worth it
because of all of the benefits for humans.
Those who oppose NASA’s plans consider them to be a colossal waste of time and
money. As one writer puts it, “What is the value of admittedly mind-blowing photographs of
distant nebulae and galaxy clusters when weighed against the literally astronomical sums of
money spent on maintaining a leaky space station, an antiquated and unreliable shuttle fleet, and
a never-ending stream of hit-or-miss probes?” (Bonta). Those against publicly-funded space
exploration believe that NASA’s yearly budget is robbing government money from more
important aspects of life, like housing, healthcare, and transportation. In a world plagued with
war, disease, poverty, and famine, any money our government spends on NASA could be better
spent dealing with issues on our own planet.
Statement of the Case
In 1958, President Dwight D Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, or NASA. Their mission was to explore the unknown: outer space. It was NASA
who put the first man on the moon, and it was NASA who first launched the space shuttle in
1981 as the way to readily access space. Recently, two probes have been sent to Mars to explore
the red planet, and it has constructed the International Space Station along with other countries.
For over forty-five years, NASA has made major advances in the science of space exploration.
The question at hand is whether the NASA federal budget is justified. The requested
budget for 2007 was approximately 16.8 billion dollars, which represents only .7 percent of the
federal budget. Over the past five decades, Americans have been very involved in the study of
outer space, a vast place yet to be completely discovered. From the countless probes and
cameras sent into space, not only have we learned what our neighboring planets, solar systems,
and galaxies look like, but important scientific discoveries have been uncovered that have then
been applied back to life on Earth. Some environmentalists and experts have suggested that
while society continues to destroy the Earth’s resources, space contains abundant amounts of
these same resources that could help our current global state. On top of the environmental
benefits, there have also been over 1,500 spin-off technologies that have been put into daily use
here on earth, such as the pacemaker, the TV satellite dish, and firefighter equipment.
On the contrary, space exploration is notoriously dangerous and has launched several
unsuccessful and fatal missions; missions such as these are considered a waste of money and a
tragedy for the loss of human lives. This presents the real question: are the benefits of space
exploration worth the cost?