In the last few days we all watched a few hundred people if that clapping themselves on the back all over a photo or photos of a planet 6 billion mile away that we never set foot upon.  A technological achievement indeed.

Knowledge is invaluable. Furthering our understanding of how the universe came into being, and ultimately how we came into being, cannot be measured as useful solely in terms of cost.

The question is looking at the present state of our planet do we really need to be taking photos of planets that we will never step on.

America was the first nation to land on the moon, but what tangible benefits to mankind have occurred as a result?

The Hubble Telescope has sent back fascinating pictures of our universe. But again, how has this benefited anyone other than providing marvelous sights which awe us?

The only life found on Mars, from the incredibly expensive probes, is some dead amoeba.

All of it hasn’t led to any medical cures or any answers to the origins of the universe.

There are many things in our world that have not discovered yet; do cures to AIDS and cancer ring a bell? And what about over coming poverty?

The point is, space exploration is extremely expensive.

I don’t feel that the solution’s to our problems can be solved by a space expedition. Perhaps it time to find a solution to what we don’t know in our world before exploring a different one. We simply don’t have the money or resources.

Besides, if it’s unemployment you’re worried about, more people to devote their lives to over-coming the problems we know about, and not digging up more for us to “solve”.

We all know that there are major crisis going on at your home planet.

Global warming and the world wild economic crisis, which will cause the collapse of Capitalism not to mention a return to Barbarity – ISIS.

Why rush off to space when we’ve can see our own planet yet?

Why bother spending all this money on exploring space when we could be helping our own planet that us humans live on.? It’s a strong argument.

Why Not?

Out in space there is virtually unlimited resources. It is all just a matter of collecting it and bringing it back, which granted will not be an easy task.

Many discoveries and products have been developed from the knowledge gained from space exploration.

For example, NASA created Velcro which is now used in many clothing items, bags and so forth. Non-stick pans and surfaces were also created as a result of space exploration.

Space travel has also given us a lot of other new things for example the micro chip, the CAT scan and so on. Plastic was invented by material engineers working on the space program. The Internet was a joint military and NASA project.

Satellites were some of the first venturers into space and are now a critical part of our society. Very important for hurricanes and dangerous storm systems.

GPS allows Google to track you ever movement.

If we compared space exploration to other areas of government spending (e.g. military), the cost of space exploration simply isn’t ridiculously high.

It’s about $10,000 to put a pound of anything into a near-earth orbit. To put a pound of anything on the moon costs about 10 times as much.

It use to costs $500 to $700 million every time the shuttle flies combined with overall cost yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.7 billion. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.

 

Billionaire space tourists have flown to the space station at a reputed price of $20 million per head.

The space station costs upward of $100 billion.

The bottom line:

So was the shuttle program worth the 40 years (10 years of development and 30 years of flight) of the $209 billion that NASA and the nation poured into it? That probably depends on your priorities and your point of view.

In 1966, NASA’s budget was $5.9 billion (4.4 percent of the federal budget). By 1972, Nixon had cut it to $3.4 billion (1.6 percent of the budget). To Day its less than one half of one penny out of each dollar the national government spends goes to NASA.

It’s still a lot of money—about 17.7 billion dollars.

And in the four decades since, NASA’s budget has continued to decrease as a proportion of national spending. The agency got $18.45 billion in fiscal year 2011, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget.

Space exploration isn’t cheap. Let’s put those trillions of dollars to good use here on Earth, where it could change the lives of millions. Send probes to space, but spend the money here on Earth.

For me the real value lies in we are starting to see how small and fragile we are out there floating in space, maybe, just maybe we will not be so prone to abusing our one true home.

To put it in perspective think about this: Apple earns $325,000 every minute.

The next and last step of human evolution is overcoming the mind and learning the truth of life.