The reason we spend so much money on space exploration is what, exactly? What have we gained? What has been our return on investment? What if we had spent that money on education instead?
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RosieGHM Jetpacker
ANSWERS: 8
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We have explored space. It may not result in finding life on other planets...but there's more out there than just "planets" to discover.
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Thirteen missions to Mars costs as much as one mission in Iraq. I think that we'd better take a look at that before we close down NASA. NASA wants 17,309,000,000 as its budget. The Iraq war is estimated to cost around 140,000,000,000. Sure, 17 billion dollars would be useful for education. However, NASA does a lot of other things than just send up spaceships. They do a lot of research on important things, from medicine to geology.
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Space exploration really took off during the Cold War and was part of the one-upmanship involved in that conflict. What have we gained? More knowledge and a lot of space debris floating around the planet. Return on investment? Hard to say as it is almost impossible to calculate the total investment. We have a really nice picture called 'Earthrise.' If we had spent the money on education? Again hard to say, but hopefully we would have people graduating from high school who could spell better and construct a sentence better than some of the people here on AB.
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My theory is that space exploration was originally a way for the government to hide defense spending. If you could land a man on the moon with in a few hundred feet of a targeted area. Surely you could deploy a atomic bomb within a block of the Kremlin in Moscow. Now a days, I'm not sure what the purpose is.
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isn't space exploration "educational"?
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As for why, I think in addition to the other answers here, we're simply *made* to do it. As a species, given the resources, we always want to know what's over 'the next horizon'. The result is that we've gained knowledge, simple as that. The knowledge, from materials to adaptions of mechanisms does have practical uses, many of them positive. What if? is really hard to answer. More people with useful skills would almost certainly be the result. They'd be a benefit, no doubt but, as a species and on an individual level, we're very attracted to glittery things. It may seem like knowledge for it's own sake, but firefighters have benefited, as has anyone who has undergone dialysis or survived with an artificial heart until a transplant can take place. If we don't find out new things, I think eventually we'll lose the fascination with learning, and stagnate as a species.
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What if somebody had asked the same question before America was discovered? We'd have half the population of the USA squeezed into Ireland and Italy - strange that none of them claim an English background;-)
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The ultimate reason for space exploration is that we have to find a new planet to populate before the sun explodes and takes this one with it.
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