On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft completed the first-ever exploration of the dwarf planet (yes, dwarf planet) Pluto. The New Horizons' 9-year, $720 million mission brought back incredible high-res photos of Pluto and its surrounding moons, vast amounts of data (including some that has yet to be downloaded) and incredible, incalculable amounts of scientific discovery just waiting to happen.
Pluto loves us! (Source: NASA)
For some people, that wasn’t enough. $720 million and all we got back were a bunch of pictures? Sure, we learned about Pluto, but what about the hungry and sick and poor people on Earth? What about all the problems that plague our society? Shouldn’t that money go towards bettering life on Earth, instead of out into space?
This “starving poor vs NASA” argument has been going on as long as--well, as long as NASA has, actually. During the Apollo missions, a nun wrote to Ernst Stuhlinger, the Associate Director for Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center. She asked him how he could justify the large amount of money going towards space exploration while there were still so many hungry children on Earth. His response is frequently cited for its eloquence and attention to detail-- and for its relevance to the modern NASA. In fact, some of the points made by Stuhlinger hold even more poignancy today: NASA’s budget consists of about 0.5% of the Federal budget, and each taxpayer gives about 0.5 cents of each tax dollar to NASA.
Yes, believe it or not, there is a campaign to raise NASA's share of each tax dollar to one whole penny. (Source: Penny4NASA)
In comparison to, say, the military’s 2015 $495.6 billion base discretionary budget, NASA’s 2015 $18.2 billion dollar total budget doesn’t seem quite so foreboding. And in the spirit of comparison: The $720 million for New Horizons is still less expensive than the Minnesota Vikings stadium, minting nickels and pennies, or the economic drag from hungover employees. Strangely enough, you don't see anyone berating hungover people for not spending that loss of productivity solving worldwide hunger.
It makes sense that NASA is on the receiving end of a lot of taxpayer griping. The high visibility and popularity of NASA's work make it both a target of admiration and high levels of critique, particularly when something goes wrong (which, it inevitably will--spaceflight, manned or unmanned, is a notoriously tricky business). However, though it may seem like the connection between NASA's satellites or astronauts and life on Earth is tenuous at best, there are actually so many connections--everything from the Hubble Space Telescope's contribution to more clear and efficient mammograms to more comfortable athletic shoes-- that NASA publishes a yearly spinoff report that showcases new technology, available to the general public, that originated somewhere at NASA. Even stronger connections are forged with NASA's Earth weather and Space weather predicting satellites that can help prevent loss of life due to extreme weather events, and prevent destruction from solar storms. The money that goes to NASA is not going into a vacuum (well, unless it is), it's going back into the economy, into technology, and into society.
"...the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." -Galen Rowell (Source: NASA)
Simply by daring to reach out and go where no one has gone before, NASA has been responsible for the understanding of our universe and the changing of our perspective. The famous 'Earthrise' photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968, the Pale Blue Dot photo taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 (a photo with an entire Carl Sagan book dedicated to it), and the photograph capturing the view of Earth from the surface of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover in 2014 all serve to show images of Earth that take us far off the surface, show us the breathtaking immensity of the universe in which we live, and the incredible fragility of our only home. Such a perspective takes our problems and all at once shrinks them down and expands them, showing us that while our planet and our species is very small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, it's all we have (because nothing quite like it or us exists anywhere else--at least, that we know of yet). NASA provides the perspective as well as the tools to work on protecting our planet and expanding our reach across the universe.
Perhaps Ernst Stuhlinger said it best in his ever-relevant letter, when he wrote, “Very fortunately though, the space age not only holds out a mirror in which we can see ourselves, it also provides us with the technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to attack these tasks with confidence."
If that's not a powerful case for space, I'm not sure what is.
