If NASA Wasn't Broke

The impact of NASA is undeniable. They have the ability to burn the importance and results of pure physics, math, engineering, and science in general into the minds of everyone they reach. Go into any middle school science classroom and you'll see posters of rockets, planets, black holes, many of which have the NASA insignia stamped right on them. If you were to ask any of those science-minded kids what do they want to be when they grow up, they're not gonna tell you they want to work for the Department of Agriculture. They're not gonna tell you they want to be a defense contractor. They're gonna tell you that they want to work for NASA, and that's pretty important.

Unfortunately, when NASA is brought up into the public eye, as much cool stuff that they accomplish and achieve, people still tend to think it's a waste. To be asked, I can kind of understand that point of view. Why spend money on sending chunks of metal to other planets when my job isn't paying me enough? Why should I spend my tax dollars on something that doesn't affect my day-to-day life? Sadly, this is where many people are mistaken. For starters, your tax dollars are hardly going to NASA. For every dollar you're taxed, you're not giving NASA a quarter; you're not giving them a dime. In fact, about half a penny is going to NASA. For an average American, that's about ten dollars a year. To compare, when you buy something off the dollar menu at McDonald's, you're paying more in sales tax than you're giving to NASA. They're pretty much running on empty all the time.

And all right, I know NASA isn't broke; twenty billion dollars is a lot of money. Except when you realize that the US military spends this in about two weeks. Now, this isn't a video to stomp all over the budget of the military. In fact, a lot of the technology that is developed through that funding is the reason why you have a lot of the things you do today. But when you look back, you realize that on average about 300 billion dollars a year has been given to the US military since the mid-1900s. You can only wonder what would happen if a similar budget was given to NASA and other space subject companies.

In case you ever want to be sad, just take a look at this: NASA's budget has been going down for a long time, from over 4.5 percent of the annual federal budget down to less than the measly 0.5 percent. What if this wasn't the case? What if, instead, spending went up through the roof and to the stars? Let's think about it. If they miraculously ended up with tons and tons of money, where would it go? Is money even the issue? NASA has been working on a little something called the Space Launch System (SLS) for the better part of the last decade. Think of it as the BFR of NASA. This system is similar to the Saturn V, the rocket responsible for all the feats NASA accomplished during the space race. It's capable of launching humans into deep space missions to the moon, to Mars, and perhaps even further.

But as is NASA tradition, it keeps getting delayed. It was first planned to fly in 2017, but that's been pushed back to 2020, and even now that deadline isn't looking too promising. With proper funding, though, this project could be completed within the next 24 months at the latest. We would literally have rockets capable of putting us back on the moon on standby, waiting to be launched at any time. Funding this project is beneficial in multiple ways. Not only will it provide us the ability to carry out thousands of experiments that are just waiting to be tested on and around the lunar surface, but it supplies tons of jobs for us here on Earth.

This wouldn't be the first time that NASA has actually brought money into the economy. For example, the 25 billion dollars spent on NASA's research and development from 1959 to 1969, which included some of the main technologies that allowed us to reach the moon, continued to return money into the economy until 1987, almost 30 years later. They returned over 181 billion dollars. Coincidentally, this 181 billion dollars is just enough money to build an entire International Space Station and still have about a year's worth of money left over. The International Space Station is still the most expensive thing ever built to date; its cost over 160 billion dollars to create. It serves as an overseeing oracle for us. It can monitor natural disasters before we can detect them here on Earth.

It's helped provide medicine for some of the worst diseases known to man. We've learned more about the human body in space than anything else. Each year, NASA spends about three to four billion dollars just maintaining and keeping the station moving forward, or about 20% of its annual budget, and this cost is only going to go up. Right now, there are six people in space, six out of 7.7 billion. Given proper funding, the ISS could expand; it can make room for new astronauts and new experiments, and perhaps even change the entire purpose of the space station in general. Instead of being a permanent and final settlement for all modern astronauts in the future, it could serve as a pit stop on the way to other destinations in our solar system.

One day these six people could turn into ten; that ten could turn into a hundred, and before you know it, we have an entire community of people orbiting around us every 90 minutes. When you look at that big rock that's spinning around our planet, somewhere on it lies the remains of six different Apollo missions from over 50 years ago. There's tons of US survey drones. There are multiple lunar rover vehicles that the astronauts drove around the landing sites. There are bags full of waste—yeah, let's call it waste.

In 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program, the one that set 12 astronauts at the surface of the Moon and returned them to Earth, was reported to Congress as about 25.4 billion dollars. In today's money, that's about 146 billion dollars. That's about three percent of the total United States current budget. With just three percent of the national budget for one year, we not only accomplished the amazing feat of putting people on another world, but we quite literally built NASA from the ground up.

You see, we didn't have the Kennedy Space Center in Houston and other Space Centers. We didn't have the equipment; we didn't have the rockets or vehicles or means of accomplishing anything. But yet, we were able to create all of it and on a really impressive timescale. And that was just with the technology we had in the 1970s. If it wasn't for the Apollo program, chances are that companies like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA might not even be around today. These three companies have a massive impact on almost every device you use today, even the one you're watching this video on right now.

We've been to the moon, and it could be time to go back. As we said in the past, it cost about 150 billion dollars for the entire Apollo program, but today that number could be drastically lower; it could even be covered in six months of NASA's current budget. NASA has made claims that we could return to the moon within the next five years for only 10 billion dollars. To be honest, a lot of the technology we have today is actually capable of sustaining a small colony on the moon, but the only problem is, of course, money. At first, we most likely wouldn't be living on the surface—it's too risky, and we don't have the resources to stay there for long periods of time.

The most likely course of action is something called the Lunar Gateway. If you've seen Interstellar or pretty much any space movie, it's about to become a reality. The Lunar Gateway will essentially act as an International Space Station but for the moon. It'll be our main base of operations for everything taking place in the lunar surface. It'll serve as a laboratory for any and all work; it'll serve as living quarters for all the scientists on board. It'll be able to hold new kinds of rovers, robots, and other technology to be put to use down on the surface. The Gateway could be regularly serviced just like the ISS.

Things will start off slow, but before you know it, we could have a rapidly growing city of sorts on the moon. But what good would come out of living there? Well, it could potentially be one of the most profitable adventures humanity has ever gone on. There's a lot of metals and materials on the moon that are actually pretty rare here on Earth. There's a chance that there could be some concentrated groups of materials that are just not as abundant on Earth, like uranium, thorium, and more. And let's not forget the poles. Exploring the lunar poles of the moon is one of the most important things on the to-do list. Why? Water. To keep it short, both humans and rockets have one thing in common: we both require oxygen.

If there's a substantial amount of water near the moon's poles, we could process that into fuel for ships or air we can breathe. This would drastically reduce the amount we would have to bring all the way from Earth. Once we have the foundation, we could pretty much use the entire moon as a mining base for anything we need. Numbers estimate that with about 40 billion dollars, we could realistically begin planning on building a long-term sustainable base on the moon, with only about four days of the United States annual budget.

There's a lot of challenges to space travel, of course. How do we get rid of our trash? How do we recycle our oxygen and other resources effectively? The list goes on. Missions to the moon are about a thousand times farther from Earth than missions to the International Space Station. So this means that we need capable and reliable systems that can reliably operate far away from our current home, support humans effectively, and still be able to be launched without being too heavy to get off the ground. It's complicated, but if we can't get to the moon with this technology, how are we expected to complete the 54 million-kilometer journey to Mars?

You see, the Moon and Mars are linked in a way. By exploring the moon and providing ways to live there long-term, we also explore Mars at the same time. The moon is kind of like the kiddie pool of space exploration, albeit a pretty big one. Before we venture out to Mars, the moon actually gives us a chance to test similar technologies that we would use on Mars. We've yet to actually stay long-term in deep space environments. The ISS only orbits at about 400 kilometers above Earth. And while yes, that technically is in space, it doesn't even compare to the 380,000-kilometer distance between us and the moon and isn't even in the same ballpark as the 50 million-kilometer journey between the Earth and Mars.

Living on the Gateway for months at a time will give us a deeper insight as to how our bodies react to the potentially harsh deep space environment and perhaps give us ways to prevent the worst from happening. A lot of the things we learned from space exploration are still being circulated in society today. NASA has something called the Technology Transfer Program. To keep it simple, it identifies technology that can be used outside of its intended use in space. For example, computer mice—that was NASA. The cameras in earphones—about one in three phones use technology that was originally planned for use in space. Every year, about 1,700 new products and technologies are tested and potentially provided to you to do whatever you want with them. They're literally giving you the ability to start businesses using their technology, and for all you know, you can eventually spin one of them off into a huge company.

You see, it's recursive. NASA gives out technology to businesses to use, and the money that these businesses make is then taxed. This tax money is then returned to NASA, and the entire process repeats. The more funding NASA receives, the more technology excels and gets better and then improves our lives even more. Since its inception over 60 years ago in 1958, the United States has spent around 600 billion dollars on NASA, or as we mentioned before, about one year's worth of the United States military budget. NASA has a weird business model, if you want to call it that. NASA doesn't spend their money hoping to get a return on their investment. The return is simply a byproduct of human ingenuity and genuine curiosity about the universe around us.

They put their money into places where they see fit, where they see value, and all the rewards that we reap are because of our desire to learn more about why we even exist. Did USA spend the most money on space exploration out of every country in the world? This is great, but in the grand scheme of things, as we saw, it's pretty much chump change. You see, we created NASA, and we gave birth to all these new ideas and technologies and foreseeable barriers that we could work towards overcoming. But then we stopped funding. It went down; people stopped caring, and we've been coasting ever since.

The Space Shuttle was an influential part of the past 30 years of spaceflight, but as we all know, it's no longer in commission. The International Space Station has single-handedly changed every single one of our lives, and yet funding for it could be phased out within the next decade, and that piece of art that orbits our planet every 90 minutes is doomed to lay dormant, orbiting the planet with no inhabitants ever again because the Soviet Union in 1957 launched a two-foot-wide ball of metal into orbit around the planet. NASA was founded, and twelve years later, we landed on the moon.

Rival competition inspires us more than anything else; it pushes us to be better than everyone else, and that's why we were able to accomplish all the crazy things we did. When the United States realized that the Soviets were capable of landing on the moon, what happened? Well, we stopped going; we stopped caring. We'd won the space race. It's only human nature to be territorial. It's what has kept us alive for so long; it's what has allowed us to rise to the top. But the problem is, the thing that has kept us alive and made us so successful is the same thing that's keeping us from progressing even further today.

It served as a fuel to create the societies that we live in today, but it also serves as a ceiling, and we're rapidly approaching it. We're literally damaging the world, the only one we know so far, to a point to where we cannot recover from it. Some of the most influential people in the world are realizing this as well, and this is why you see companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and many others not competing with NASA but rather working alongside them. We can no longer wait to be helped; we have to take things into our own hands. Half a penny, 0.5%—that thin slice is responsible for all the hopes and dreams of our future. It's responsible for some of the biggest technological advances in the past 10,000 years, and yet people still think it isn't worth it.

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