To Boldly Go

This was going to be a rant about the ineffectual nature of the United Nations, its inability to do anything other than serve as a forum for the diplomatically disgruntled and the stupidity of anyone who thinks that the UN is in any way connected to a secret conspiracy to take over the world.

Then NASA dropped the Curiosity Rover onto Mars and I decided to do something about that instead. Because that’s far more interesting.

And by the way when I say dropped, I’m not kidding around. The last part of the Rover’s arrival on Mars involved it being dropped from a massive sky crane attached to it with what is essentially string. That’s right; NASA dropped a probe the size of a large car, from a crane, that had been sent all the way from Earth. The mind boggling awesomeness of that concept is just astounding. The Rover will now tour Mars picking up soil samples and trying to figure out if there is or ever was life on Mars.

So now to my question, if NASA is capable of doing something this cool, why does its budget absolutely suck?

It does. NASA’s budget for this fiscal year is a measly $17.7 billion, a mere 1.4% of the US’ yearly budget. Out of that NASA has to pay its staff, finance experiments, and spend $2.5 billion putting the Curiosity Rover on Mars.

Interestingly enough, the US spends $19.8 billion every year on nuclear weapons and related expenditure out of a total defence budget of $711 billion. The fact the combined defence spending of the rest of the UN security council wouldn’t even come close to the US defence budget, or the fact that the US spends double what it spends on welfare on defence, or that education spending makes up only 4% of the yearly budget is a rant for another day, but its expenditure on nuclear weapons alone means that the US spends more on letting members of the Navy potter around the world’s oceans playing solitaire than NASA gets to play with in a whole year.

I mean what’s up with that?

The US likes to paint itself as a world leader. The interest in science and space generated by Curiosity creates an opening for America to become a much more rounded world leader, not only in defence but also in the realms of science and technology. Newt Gingrich’s promise of lunar bases by 2020 may have been a completely empty one, but it spoke not only to a part of the American psyche, but to part of the psyche of the entire Western world, the bit that perked up when JFK promised to land a man on the Moon within the decade. Now we have the opportunity to put ourselves even further out there and perhaps could eventually even put a man on Mars. Not necessarily in the next decade, but perhaps within the next half century.

NASA have achieved something amazing, with a budget which was basically scraped together from behind the federal sofa cushions. Imagine what they could do with an adequate amount of money!

Next stop: The Red Planet.