NASA Splashdown

Looking through a recent issue of National Geographic I was struck by a full page ad pleading for donations for disaster victims in a Third World country. This ad was posted in the middle of a story about the Hubble Telescope and was bracketed by truly amazing pictures of galaxies that are millions of light years away from Earth. Don't get me wrong, I like looking at pretty pictures and dreaming of becoming an astronaut just as much as the next guy but I think we have our priorities just a little backwards.

The space race is over and we won. The John Glenn experiment, (seeing how an older person will handle weightlessness) has been examined and we already know that we can grow certain plants in space so thank God for that minor miracle. We cannot inhabit our own Moon so why would we even try to explore Mars? We can't handle our own waste without turning our planet into a toxic dump so why would we bother to do the same to another planet?

NASA's current fiscal year 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States Federal budget, 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States, and 269% of the National Science Foundation budget. Source: NASA

Hubble Telescope Cost: 76 million went for the Shuttle servicing mission, the engineering maintenance of the Hubble mission cost about 475 million. Tile inspection and rescue mission capabilities equal 553 to 636 million. Source: NASA

President Obama should form a committee to re task those resources to develop new energy strategies, increase education spending for children to support math and science programs, take care of our elderly population and fund extensive medical research to help improve the lives of the people who need help.

If there are still NASA engineers who need to build rockets and shoot them off into space after all of these social programs are funded and if there is still money left over that no one wants then I say let them at least put some nuclear waste in the rockets so their payload bays can do some good for the rest of us. Exploding Earth's nuclear waste in deep space will look very similar to the images the Hubble telescope transmits now and will probably be even more spectacular!