Is NASA A Waste of Money?

As many of you may know, NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Or simply put, the government administration that deals with space. Because NASA is a government entity, it gets its funding in a budget approved by congress, in 2021 NASA’s budget allocates them around 23 billion dollars. So, is pursuing space really worth it? While space may seem cool and in the famous words of Star Trek “Space: The final frontier” meaning that space is the last great thing humanity hasn’t really explored yet. But from a financial standpoint, space is highly unlikely to be lucrative and the benefits of planetary

colonization and exploration aren’t particularly needed… yet. Many years down the line the pollution of Earth will be so vile that humanity simply decides to leave this once great planet. Or perhaps some cosmic disaster happens and humanity is forced to flee. But for the foreseeable future there isn’t really much benefit to going to space besides being prepared and of course, to satiate human curiosity about the great stars above. When weighed against other more useful things now such as clean energy and new ways of doing things, NASA doesn’t really stack too well. Its a short term vs potential long term benefit. In conclusion, the main thing that NASA does now is to try and explore space and keep that curiosity to explore satisfied. It doesn’t really have much monetary benefit besides providing jobs, although perhaps one day it may be useful and nowadays its the first steps to more advanced space exploration.

Related articles:

https://www.machinedesign.com/community/editorial-comment/article/21832319/is-nasa-a-waste-of-money

https://theappalachianonline.com/opinion-spending-on-space-is-wasteful/

https://debatewise.org/137-space-exploration-is-a-waste-of-money/