“Present needs are top priority”
This is in response to a letter submitted to The Kansas City Star and published in today’s paper that I’m compelled to respond to. The letter was submitted by someone that is considered to be an ‘annoyance’ to space enthusiasts. I’m talking about the people who have only one argument against space exploration, and we’ve all heard it before: ‘Why are we spending money to send people into space when we could be spending it on feeding the hungry here on Earth?’
First of all, I don’t want to come off sounding like someone who doesn’t care about those in society who depend on federal dollars to merely survive. I think a lot of this argument comes from a misunderstanding about how much money NASA is truly spending, especially in comparison to other government expenditures (including social welfare, wars, etc.)
This year, NASA’s budget is $17.3 billion, or 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion federal budget. This particular letter noted the current Mars Phoenix lander; cost - $520 million since 2001. The cost of the current space shuttle mission to the ISS - approximately $1.3 billion. The new laboratory that is being installed on the ISS right now, Kibo, was built in Japan. The whole Kibo lab costs $3 billion, with all of that money coming from taxpayers in Japan.
By comparison, available data from the 2006 federal budget indicates that a substantially larger sum of money has been spent on social welfare issues. 21% ($548.5 billion) spent on Social Security, 19% ($510.5 billion) spent on Medicare and Medicaid, and 20% ($521.8 billion) spent on defense. The war in Iraq by some estimates has cost the U.S. $845 billion, with the U.S. economy picking up a tab of nearly $3 trilliondollars in war related expenses since 2003. That’s more than the U.S. federal budget this year! (For a reference, if NASA’s budget were $17 billion a year [which it isn’t], since 2003 that would be a total of approximately $85 billion)
Tackling the issue of how much the government is spending on food stamps, in the Fiscal Year 2005, the government spent $28.6 billion on food stamps, feeding 25.7 million people. NASA’s budget in 2005 (adjusted for inflation) was $15.6 billion. Just slightly over half of what was spent that year on food stamps.
When push comes to shove, NASA is usually at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to essential government spending. For instance, my candidate for the 2008 Presidential election, Barack Obama, has plans to cut the NASA budget and use the additional money on education. It’s a bummer for me and a boon for the Chinese because the money that will be cut is coming straight from NASA’s Constellation program, which is responsible for building the Space Shuttle’s replacement. It would lengthen the gap of 5 years for how long NASA will have to rely on the ‘Ruskies’ for human space transportation to the ISS and delay our return to The Moon from 2020 to at the earliest 2024-2025. The Chinese and Russians have plans to land on The Moon before that, and that brings me to my next topic.
NASA Needs Help
The 5 year gap between the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the expected first test flights of the Orion capsule in 2015 are posing a problem for NASA. They will be, for the most part, relying on the Russian Soyuz or even their next generation spacecraft, the Klipper, for transportation to a space station which we largely paid the bill for (it was even our idea to begin with!) NASA intends to abandon its official operations on the space station around 2015, meaning the last U.S. spacecraft to dock with the station is likely to be the Space Shuttle Atlantis on its final voyage.
For the better part of its existence, NASA has shunned international cooperation in the development of new space technologies. The ISS is the only major exception. The Russian Klipper for instance, is designed to replace the powerhouse of the Russian space program, the Soyuz, which has been operating since the late 1960’s. The Russians, always opportunistic in looking for additional funds, have gone in to a partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) to help speed up the development on the Klipper. As a reward, the ESA will get its own manned spacecraft and not have to rely on Russian or American space programs for manned spaceflight. NASA has rejected any international cooperation in developing Orion.
Not surprisingly, relations between the U.S. and Russia are strained. The only reason that Americans are allowed to travel on board the Russian Soyuz today is the result of an exception made to a piece of U.S. legislation that prohibited NASA’s use of Russian spacecraft until Russia agreed to stop supporting Iran’s nuclear program. This of course, has not happened. The only other nation that has a manned space program is China, and they have only launched 2 manned missions since its inception in 2003, and cooperation is highly, HIGHLY, unlikely.
In its usual style, realizing that the whole world is against it, NASA has requested that the ESA speed up its development of a manned spaceflight system so that we can have another ride into space when our relations with Russia inevitably “hit the fan.” At the same time, NASA wants to stress its commitment to international cooperation in returning to The Moon and in the first missions to Mars.
NASA’s international attitudes reflect and change as often as the global zeitgeist does. There’s little consistency in their international cooperation policies, leaving much of the rest of the world to view the whole program as a farce.
If NASA wants to get to The Moon by 2020 and beat the Russians and Chinese, it might have to be at the expense of also having a few European flags next to the Stars and Stripes on the return voyage. The only way that will happen is if active cooperation starts now in the development of Orion. It may not be a purely American engineered spacecraft in the end, but we live in a different world than the one during the days of the Apollo missions.
The world is flat, and NASA has a prime position to take the first ’small steps’ for the U.S. government in international cooperation; something the government has been lacking for quite some time. The ‘go it alone’ attitude at this stage will not get us to The Moon before the Russians or Chinese. We have an opportunity to reach out and set an example for international cooperation in space; but it needs to start now on Earth.
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Image credits: PBS, NASA APOD, Wikipedia
Letter referred to published in The Kansas City Star (6/8) page B12