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Should we spend valuable resources on space exploration? We should not use valuable resources for space exploration because it would affect astronauts’ brains and health by being in a spaceship for a long period of time. It could also cause a shortage of valuable resources that we could use to build dams, homes, and farms to use for our everyday life. It would also cost, “ For NASA astronauts, McAlister says, orbital trips can have a $58 million price tag” (www.usatoday.com). It also costs a lot of human labor, metal shortage, and more money to also fund missions to space by the U.S government. It also uses valuable time and mental health issues during the missions outside the protection of Earth’s atmosphere.
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Should we spend valuable resources on space exploration?

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Should we spend valuable resources on space exploration?
We shouldn't use valuable resources for space exploration because the resources we have are limited for us. We can have problems with those resources that are either going to then start to have a shortage on it. We also shouldn't use valuable resources because we could use those resources for different things such as better products for technology, protection for homes, and education but not for space exploration but for other subjects for school.

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One reason for not using valuable resources for space exploration because it can lead to brain issues and it can lead to memory loss because of the cosmic rays. That means that some scientific research with mice to test to see what would happen if the cosmic rays to their brains to see if the same effects can happen to humans.

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If we do use valuable resources we can lose items that could be used to improve the world even though it could expand knowledge throughout the world. We could use those resources for more homes, hospitals, schools, and maybe a raise fund for teachers and other first responders. We could also use it to protect the forests and to also build more parks and mueseums.

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Another reason we should not use valuable resources for space exploration because valuable resources also cost millions if not billions of American dollars to use and use valuable time and a lot of human labor to add all the extra protection and extra weight to a spaceship. As well because the resources we have we should use them wisely because once we run out of a specific resource, it's gone. So the more we save our resources we can use them for stuff that will improve the community and add stronger protection against things in the future that we should be aware of. There are resources we use daily that can be replaced, such as wood, energy, light, fire, water, and etc. Resources we can't replace are such as, metal, coal, iron, gold, diamond, steel, oil, gasoline oil, space for land, specific animals, and certain designs that helped the world. So this reason also supports how we shouldn't use valuable resources for space exploration. It also supports how we can and can't replace certain resources and how to use those resources wisely.

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My counter claim is how space exploration can lead to dangerous outcomes for astronauts such as memeroy loss, headaches, strange behaviors out of the protection of the Earth's atmosphere.

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"Space agencies involved in human space flight are located in the US (NASA), Russia, The European Union (ESA), China, Canada, Japan and India. The US, Russia and China are the only countries to have independently put people in space. India and Japan state that they have the intention of doing this in the coming decades. European and Canadian astronauts fly with NASA, and the Russian Space Agency and are involved in the International Space Station.

You can see the NASA budget over the last 40 or so years here. In 2005 NASA had a budget of $16.2 billion; this includes not only the human spaceflight division, but also other engineering projects, and science funded by NASA. The total federal spending budget in 2005 was on the order of $2 trillion ($2000 billion), making the NASA share 0.8% of the budget. By comparison roughly 19% of the budget was spent on the Military, 21% on Social Security and 8% went to paying interest on the national debt.

The ESA budget for 2005 was 2.98 billion euros (about 3.5 billion dollars), but many European countries also have their own space agencies which are independently funded, so it's not strictly a fair comparison.

ESA and NASA are by far the highest funded agencies. The Russian space agency has an annual budget of $800-900 million dollars (and it's about the same for India), Japan ~1.8 billion, China ~1.2 billion." (http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/150-people-in-astronomy/space-exploration-and-astronauts/general-questions/921-how-much-money-is-spent-on-space-exploration-intermediate).
This supports on how so much money is used by some countries to fund for space exploration, those funds can be used to pay for ending world hunger, highways, homes, schools, churches, hospitals, and more. This article shows how much that can affect the community and how we chould use that money for important things happening in everyday lives. This supports on how "Should we spend valuable resources on space exploration?".

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What countries are involved in space exploration? And how much money of the United States Budget, and the top 5 other countries' budgets are being used for space exploration?
Space agencies involved in human space flight are located in the US (NASA), Russia, The European Union (ESA), China, Canada, Japan and India. The US, Russia and China are the only countries to have independently put people in space. India and Japan state that they have the intention of doing this in the coming decades. European and Canadian astronauts fly with NASA, and the Russian Space Agency and are involved in the International Space Station.

You can see the NASA budget over the last 40 or so years here. In 2005 NASA had a budget of $16.2 billion; this includes not only the human spaceflight division, but also other engineering projects, and science funded by NASA. The total federal spending budget in 2005 was on the order of $2 trillion ($2000 billion), making the NASA share 0.8% of the budget. By comparison roughly 19% of the budget was spent on the Military, 21% on Social Security and 8% went to paying interest on the national debt.

The ESA budget for 2005 was 2.98 billion euros (about 3.5 billion dollars), but many European countries also have their own space agencies which are independently funded, so it's not strictly a fair comparison.

ESA and NASA are by far the highest funded agencies. The Russian space agency has an annual budget of $800-900 million dollars (and it's about the same for India), Japan ~1.8 billion, China ~1.2 billion.

To be fair though, we need to compare these numbers to something which tells you about the wealth of the nation - for example the Gross Domestic Product. The CIA world factbook is a great resource for information like that.

It's also interesting to work out how much is spent per person:

Considering the total budget for the world for space (~25 billion dollars), the total amount spent per person is $3.90 (working on 6.4 billion people), and the percentage of the GDP of the world which is spent on space is roughly 0.05%.

Update by Ann: We've revisited this page in June 2015, so we have some updates to share. Because of the way budgets work, we'll go back in time a little bit and look at the year 2014: that year, NASA had a total budget of about $17.6 billion. As Karen noted above, that doesn't just include human exploration but absolutely everything that NASA does. Overall for 2014, that was 0.5% of the total federal budget, so NASA's overall share of the United States budget has decreased a bit.

As for the other countries listed above, in 2014 the European Space Agency had a budget of about 4.3 billion euros, or $5.51 billion (in US dollars); the Russian Federal Space Agency had a budget of about $5.6 billion; Japan's space agency JAXA was funded at $2.03 billion; China National Space Administration (CNSA) spent about $1.3 billion; and the Indian Space Research Organisation had a budget of about $1.1 billion.

Again, as Karen noted above, there are other contributions to space-related spending in each of these situations, and not all of an agency's spending is focused on space exploration. For instance, private space flight research and development has become a major player in the United States, but that spending isn't captured by the statistics on federal spending via NASA.

Also since Karen's answer, the spaceflight programs of both India and China have really taken off (pun intended!). By 2008, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) had sent a non-crewed probe to the moon, known as Chandrayaan-1. In 2013, ISRO launched an orbital mission to Mars, with successful Mars orbit achieved in 2014. This was pulled off with a very small budget of just about $72 million, for the satellite itself and all of the ground tracking and communication infrastructure needed here on Earth. For its part, China has built and launched the Tiangong-1 space station, several crewed and uncrewed Shenzhou missions, and the Chang'e 3 lunar lander and rover.
Page last updated on June 22, 2015, by Ann Martin

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How much money is spent on space exploration? (Intermediate)

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(Intermediate) >" onclick="window.open(this.href,'win2','status=no,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,width=640,height=480,directories=no,location=no'); return false;" rel="nofollow"> What countries are involved in space exploration? And how much money of the United States Budget, and the top 5 other countries' budgets are being used for space exploration? Space agencies involved in human space flight are located in the US (NASA), Russia, The European Union (ESA), China, Canada, Japan and India.