Pro & Con: The Funding of NASA

PRO (Joey Kaye):

As a young child, I was determined to be an astronaut and one day go to space. However, thanks to the policies of the Obama administration, this dream is unrealistic for children in our country today.

Let’s be honest, the chances of me ever becoming an astronaut were always unlikely. However, that dream made me much more interested in science and it motivated me to always work hard in my school work. That goal is about as dim as a distant star in the night sky for the youth today in this country.

President Barack Obama and his administration argued the space shuttle program was a waste of resources and was not effective anymore. As a result, in July 2011, NASA’s most iconic and successful space flight program came to an end as STS-135 marked the final flight of the shuttle. When the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time on July 21, 2011, America’s dominance in space came to screeching halt.

Now, we as a country must rely on private space industries and the Russian space agencies to ferry our U.S. astronauts in space and to the International Space Station. Don’t forget, NASA was responsible for a majority of the funding and construction of the International Space Station throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. Now we can’t even get to it!

The Obama administration has no idea where to take human space flight from here and they have made a mistake in leaving responsibility of building the country’s next spacecraft to private industries. It’s even more maddening that this administration failed to establish any constructive plans that outline what will replace the space shuttle a considerable amount of time prior to the final STS-135 flight in July 2011. Instead, President Obama simply cut the program and decided to worry about a replacement sometime down the road. Moreover, during most of Obama’s time in office, NASA has received record lows in terms of funding.

To be fair, the funding for NASA is the responsibility of Congress, but we certainly don’t see the president encouraging increased funding for NASA in his budgets or stumping for the space program at grand town hall meetings like he does for other issues.

Nonetheless, the mood around NASA has become more optimistic with the release of NASA’s 2014 budget earlier this year in January because of a small $800 million increase in funding, according to an article by Geekosystem writer Carolyn Cox.

According to a report by Space Policy Online, renowned expert in U.S space policy and New York University Professor John Logdon recently criticized the Obama administration’s NASA policies by saying, “The lack of leadership of this administration has put us in a situation which is unfortunate.” He went on to state, “By this time, President Obama should have invited international partners to work together to define the future of the space program and should have given NASA a relative crisp sense of what its role should be.”

I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of Logdon. NASA has been ignored by the Obama administration and their future remains uncertain.

NASA is currently working on projects that include flying astronauts to an asteroid relatively near Earth and the Orion program, which is NASA’s next planned space vehicle to hopefully bring astronauts to near-Earth orbit, the moon and beyond.

Nonetheless, due to the reduction in funding, the recent sequester, the lack of support from the Obama administration, and its willingness to transfer the creation of America’s next human spaceflight programs to questionable private industries, the Orion program has fallen far behind schedule.

America should always remain dominant when it comes to human spaceflight no matter what the financial cost. Too many people have strived and sacrificed to make spaceflight for this country possible, and seemingly abandoning it like this presidential administration has done is disrespectful to those who dedicated so much to spaceflight such as the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia who died in pursuit of space exploration.

We must return to space immediately. We must continue to explore it and we must always remain the most dominant power in regards to spaceflight.

CON (Joshua Meadows):

The rise of NASA and the subsequent success of the space program in America is one of the accomplishments that citizens of our country should be proud of. NASA’s ultimate goal was achieved in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. We had beaten Russia! We had gone where no man had been before. Spirits were high and NASA’s budget was blooming.

We continued to go to the moon, but fewer people watched the telecasts every time it happened. Somehow, the idea of going to the moon became common hat for the American public. While

NASA continued to push boundaries, both literally and figuratively, the loss of the public’s support eventually turned into a loss of funding from the government.

Indeed, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reported that in 1966, NASA’s budget represented 4.41 percent of the total federal budget. The percentage of money dedicated to NASA’s budget, however, decreased on a general downward slope every year until 2012 which reported a .48 percent share for NASA’s budget.

NASA’s budget today is one that allows it to perform tasks of maintenance and limited exploration. Are they receiving the type of funding they need to allow them to push humanity to Mars? No. Should they be receiving more funding than they currently do? No.

There are three reasons why America would become actively engaged in a manned space program once again: aliens, profitability and global competition.

If we discovered some type of alien life, it is reasonable to suspect that the entire world would seek to race to space in order to confront the unknown.

If we found an easy way to make substantial profits from something in space, whether it be from energy or mining, for example, then governments would drop everything in order to have a piece of the space pie.

Finally, global competition to a stellar body would ensure that America’s government, once again, became a stakeholder in manned space exploration.

These conditions are not being met at the present time. Therefore, according to my criteria, the government has no reason to fund NASA to classic space-race levels. There is no vested interest at present.

Do I want an active space program? Yes. I want science fiction to become science reality. We must, however, live in the reality that exists now. That reality is one wherein robotic exploration, which NASA has been fantastically successful with, is favored by the government for its cheaper cost and safer (relative to human exploration) aspect.

At the present, robots can do everything that humans can do without a possible loss of life. Barring a romantic reason for human space exploration, there is no pragmatic path to the stars for man outside of an event that represents a paradigm shift with regard to the way in which the government funds NASA.