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SUMMARY
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You may think that NASA just has a lot of money to make rockets. However, that isn't true. NASA doesn't

Get as big of a budget as you may think. NASA uses most of its money on employing smart engineers and making new items to stay on earth. This article explains why NASA needs the money and why we should accept that.

NEW WORD
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Fatal: leading to failure or disaster

VOCABULARY
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Discretionary, space faring, rigorous

POEM (haiku)
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space is dangerous
space is needed but costly
space is very cool

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Emily Lakdawalla * December 30, 2011

In the hours after Curiosity launched last month, there were more than a few people questioning the worth of spending two and a half billion dollars to launch a spacecraft to Mars. This is absolutely a fair question to ask. It's important to place the question in context, because most people in the general public think NASA gets a much larger fraction of the U.S. budget than it actually does (people tend to think it gets five or even 15 or 20 percent of the budget, when the actual number is about 0.4 percent).

Even though NASA is not as large a part of the budget as people think it is, it's irrefutable that $2,500,000,000 (the approximate total cost of Curiosity through its primary mission) or $17,800,000,000 (the fiscal year 2012 budget for all of NASA) is a lot of money that could pay for lots of other worthwhile things. I wondered how it compared to other discretionary expenses, so I checked. The 2012 budget for federal cultural grants agencies -- things like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian, and so on -- totals a little over $1,250,000,000, or about half the cost of the Curiosity mission. The National Park Service gets $2,200,000,000 out of the Department of Interior's total $12,000,000,000 budget. NASA has a relatively big budget.

Obviously, I believe NASA is worth the money. But it's such a lot of money that it's difficult to explain briefly why it's worth it. Here's what I think: investing in NASA makes us smarter, improves our lives, and increases our capability to overcome technological challenges. Even more important, though, are the intangible benefits of pride, respect from other nations, respect for our place in the universe, and hope for a future in which we can accomplish even greater things. In this post I'm going to explain why I think these things. This will be an unusually U.S.-centric post for me, but many of the ideas in it apply to other spacefaring nations.

First, there are some immediate practical benefits to spending on space exploration. Billions of dollars spent on NASA are not crateloads of cash loaded onto a rocket and shot into space. The high costs are not associated (entirely) with the materials that leave Earth. Instead, they're associated with the technical challenges of building machines to rigorous specifications. To meet those technical challenges, we need lots of very smart engineers, and those engineers are developing all kinds of new technologies. Many of those new technologies can be turned to commercial uses, providing a direct economic benefit and making America one of the few nations in the world capable of revolutionary technological innovation. NASA has a website devoted to spinoff technologies; there's a lot more than just Velcro and Tang. NASA technologies have made their way into medical, architectural, military, automotive, and artistic applications, just to name a few.

Just as important, the brains capable of all that innovation remain here on Earth, ready to develop more valuable, new ideas. Not every engineer at a NASA center is building scientific spacecraft; they work for commercial clients and the military, too, innovating new solutions to practical problems here on Earth. NASA technologies and space industry engineers make our lives better and give America economic power.

All of that is good but I do wonder what an economic analysis of the return on our investment would show. I do not know (can anybody point me to a paper?) but my working hypothesis would be that we don't get 18 billion dollars' worth of direct economic benefit annually from our 18-billion-dollar investment. [EDIT: Barbara Cohen pointed me to an excellent NASA HQ library resource on measuring the return on investment in NASA, and said that estimates of ROI in NASA range from 1:1 to 9:1, much larger than I had thought..]

That's where we get to the intangibles: pride, respect, and hope. Pride is complicated; there's good pride and there's bad pride. The good kind of pride is the kind that you feel when you achieve something, and it scales with the challenge inherent in your achievement. When I stand with thousands of others and watch a great rocket soar on that parabolic arc into the sky, carrying with it a relatively tiny, almost unimaginably complex package that embodies more than ten years' worth of hard work of more thousands of skilled people, I feel immense pride that my country can do such difficult things. I didn't build that rover, or that rocket, but my team did.

It's a good feeling, but why is that important? If you are proud of what you do, and what you can do, you have self-respect. And if you can accomplish such great things, you can earn the respect of others. There is a lot of value in respect. We as a nation have lost a lot of respect in recent years, and with that loss of respect has come a loss of political power and a reduction in our capability to lead other nations into actions that are compatible with our interests. Our space program is one of the things that makes us great, that sets us far apart from other productive countries, that makes us respectable, that makes our advice worth listening to. I don't really know how to put a value on that, but I feel comfortable saying that the value of that respect must be measured in many billions of dollars. There's a story about physicist Robert Rathburn Wilson testifying to Congress, who was asked by a senator: is a large science project (which became Fermilab) connected with the security of our country? The response: "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending." *

Another intangible benefit of space exploration is hope. "Hope" became a politically charged word in our last election, and that's too bad, because it's so important. Hope and confidence that the future will be better than the present have always been an important driver of American growth. Hope is what brought the first colonists to American shores, and hope is what continues to bring immigrants to the United States today. Hope for the future makes us want to contribute to the greater good, while lack of hope makes us selfish and defensive. Space exploration, especially human space exploration, has always been coupled to visions of a future filled with technological wonders, breathtaking vistas, and a home world more advanced than the one we live on now. We can't make all of those visions come true, but the ones we can achieve through our toil will make our children's lives better than ours.

Visions of being part of that better world filled with better things and unimagined wonders are what drive children into studying science and technology. Not every kid who imagines herself an astronaut is going to walk on Mars some day, or captain an interstellar spaceship. But by following those dreams, she will develop the mind and skills needed to keep advancing our technological capability and maintain our economic standing.

There's a final wildcard reason why I think it's important to explore space. We don't know what we're going to find until we get out there. We don't know yet what we don't know. What are we going to discover out there that will be important or valuable out there someday? Maybe nothing. Maybe something that will change everything. Once people have met their basic needs -- food, shelter, security -- they look outward, look for something more, hope for something even better somewhere out there, seek answers to the question of how we got here in the first place, and wonder whether we're the only ones here. It's just the way we are. We're curious. Of course, just because curiosity is natural doesn't mean it's good. It's natural for humans to commit violence, too, and that's usually not good. And in fact curiosity, and messing with the unknown, don't always pay off. Not infrequently it results in disaster for the explorers. But occasionally, we find treasure, literally or figuratively. It was a willingness to probe the unknown in the uncertain hope that we'd find something better that led the first Europeans to America, and look at what we are now. Will our push into the solar system accomplish the same thing? Who knows? But we'll never know if we don't try.

Happy new year, everybody. May 2012 be filled with wondrous discoveries and delightfully puzzling new questions.

* Thanks to commenter Steven D. Adams for pointing me to the exact quote from Dr. Wilson.

Casey Dreier

Casey Dreier

Casey Dreier

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Investing in NASA makes us smarter, improves our lives, and increases our capability to overcome technological challenges. Even more important, though, are the intangible benefits of pride, respect from other nations, respect for our place in the universe, and hope for a future in which we can accomplish even greater things.

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A central idea of this article is that space and space travel lead to overall extreme steps for mankind. One fascinating detail is ,"Perhaps the most direct benefit comes from technologies used on earth that were first pioneered in space exploration". Another detail is, "Supporting more than 7,000 jobs in at least 31 states". The final detail is," The Search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a network that advocates looking for life around the universe, likely because communicating with beings outside of earth could bring us some benefit".  This article talks about how space travel and companies like NASA bring benefits to humans. Anywhere from resources to new knowledge. Space provides us with all these things.

Vocab:

Hostile: unfriendly

Fatal: Something bad or deadly

Ire: anger

Poem:

We explore space

To discover a wonderful place

It is full of fascinating wonders

And no thunder

Different planets offer different benefits

For example mars is sunlit

Space offers humans the chance to

Be able to go to mars and dance

Link:
https://www.universetoday.com/37079/benefits-of-space-exploration/

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Space debris is a growing problem for space travel, our Earth, and for astronauts. 73% of tracked space debris resides low-earth orbit 1200 above our planet's surface. Additionally, tens of millions of paint-chip like pieces that measure smaller than one centimeter; however, they are very dangerous for our earth. Traveling at such hyper velocities, space debris proposes a major threat to any spacecraft travel because any collision with a spacecraft can cause large orbital trash to grow . A China and Russian spacecraft both collided with mass amounts of space debris causing 2,900 space debris cloud combined. These two events combined increased the low-orbit amount of debris by 60%.

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VOCAB

Expansive: covering a wide area in terms of space or scope; extensive or wide-ranging

Fragments: a small part broken or separated off something.

Hyper: unusually excited
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POEM
space debris
is ruining our earth
space debris
is ruining our space
space debris
is ruining our world
one day at a time
humans passing by without a care for our home
link:https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/uploads/infographics/full/10929.jpeg

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summary:

NASA is sending out many spaceships and other things to space and there are many hazards that end up poorly. NASA has been preparing a list of safety standards that a private spaceship would have to meet before any NASA astronaut climbs on board. Also, any accident would probably result in a long investigation and spaceflights being grounded. Lastly, if a vehicle does not fly right, NASA will be held accountable for what has happened.  This shows that there are many consequences if a space vehicle doesn’t fly right or go as planned.
vocab:
somberly: dark or dull in color tone
ramifications: a consequence of an action or event, especially when complex or unwelcome.
scrutiny: critical observation or examination.
poem:

Outer space

Nothing like a small case

Many spacecrafts

Just like Minecraft

So much space equipment

Astronauts so brilliant

NASA controls it all

Like space is their doll

In the end

Space is a full send.
link:  https://www.npr.org/2011/01/28/133308080/nasa-prepares-for-risks-in-private-space-travel