In Defense of the Last Outpost

With the recent launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Fancy Cameras with which certain VioPac agents are involved, I thought it time to address some of the comments made by the public, from the ephemeral Joseph Q. Sixpack all the way to the Office of the President.

Many people often decry the money spent on space exploration as being wasteful and pointless, arguing that we humans have deeper problems at home that need resolution before we can afford to go off half-cocked into the deepest reaches of space. These people are, for want of a better word, stupid, and here's why.

It has been suggested that the Government take money from the NASA budget and use it to fix education. Great. NASA's budget at the height of the Apollo program was six tenths of one percent of the Federal budget. Now it's more like one tenth of one percent. What are you going to do with all that money, build an ice rink? Come on people, even if you could solve the education crisis in this country by throwing more money at it, raiding NASA's funding isn't going to get you anything--and even if it could, without something to do with that education why should we bother? You want to find some place in the Federal budget to fund education and whatever other pet projects you've got brewing? Here's a suggestion: dump these costly and disastrous foreign wars and use that money to pay for them.

Okay, they say, but what's the practical value in exploration? Seriously? Do you like anti-lock brakes? GPS? How about tracking global warming and predicting the weather? Ever use velcro? Like to keep all those Russian missiles at bay? Maybe you'd like to see proof of the devastation of the rainforests in, say, Rondonia, Brazil, or measure the effects of the Commie Chinese and their toxic emissions? You get to do all that and much more because some smart people figured out how to put robots, probes, cameras and people in orbit and beyond. NASA efforts allow us to do all those things.

That's all fine and good of course, but space exploration isn't immediately about practical benefits. The thing is, the human exploration of space is one of the last purely heroic endeavours I can think of. That alone makes it necessary for us to get back into the game. Yes, there are acts of heroism even in war, but War itself (be it the War On Drugs or the War On Iraq) is not an heroic enterprise.

What other purpose can we have as a species if not exploring the universe around us? Getting us back out there is not a luxury, it's a requirement. The question isn't "how can we justify the expense?", it is, "how can we not?"

40 years ago, Apollo 11 launched three astronauts to the Moon. They did it with rudimentary computers that couldn't keep up with your cellphone battery (to say nothing of the phone itself). Here we are 40 years later and, with computers 100 times smaller and almost infinitely more powerful, we've gone no further than that. That, dear readers, is a travesty. It is vitally necessary for humankind to get the heck off this planet and, as geeky as it sounds, take our rightful place in the stars.