Op-Ed: Why Humanity Needs To Go To Space

I got an incredible opportunity while on a vacation in Florida a few months ago. At around two in the morning on my last day there, my dad and I got in a car, drove down to Titusville, and watched the launch of Nasa’s Crew-2 mission, a mission on which four humans flew aboard a controlled bomb all the way to the International Space Station (And then they landed the controlled bomb). And it was the most incredible thing I’ve seen in my life—a burst of light from the rocket turned the night into day from a bridge nearly two miles away, and slowly rose into the sky before slowly disappearing, but not before filling the sky with a plume of hot gases unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And while rocket launches may create a spectacle, human travel into space has created far more tangible benefits for humanity which have likely benefited you individually at some point in your life.

In fact, NASA has an entire website dedicated to these technologies. If you’ve ever gotten LASIK surgery, you can thank NASA for the technology, which was derived from technology used to dock spacecraft together. Memory foam was originally developed to protect test pilots from plane crashes, and a system used to detect water in the Libyan desert was based on technology developed by NASA. And these were just some of the technologies that may not have been developed if it weren’t for human spaceflight. (It is a common myth that NASA developed technologies such as Velcro, Barcodes, and Space Pens. These were, in actuality, not developed by NASA).

And yet, there are even more practical benefits that could come with space if we, as a species, were to embrace the stars. A successful Lunar Colony could mine up valuable Rare Earth Elements and use a mass driver to send these metals back to Earth. These metals, which are essential to modern technology, are currently being mined on Earth in ways that significantly damage their environment, primarily in China giving them a significant strategic advantage over the West. If we were to instead mine these on the moon or from asteroids such as 16 Psyche, we could not only significantly alleviate the environmental impacts of rare earth mining, but the west could aso regain a strategic advantage over China by doing so (of course, China would be doing this too, but there’s enough to go around).

However, I often see people criticizing spaceflight under the premise that we need to focus on Earth rather than space, completely missing the fact that fighting climate change and going to space are not mutually exclusive, and in fact these two initiatives can benefit each other. The presence of satellites in orbit to keep track of the weather has given us a much deeper understanding of climate change, and a few decades ago, it helped us detect the hole in the ozone layer. And then there are the numerous benefits that space exploration has provided towards renewable technologies as described in the previously mentioned NASA website.

And then there’s the other criticism of spaceflight, which is the cost. A single space shuttle launch cost around $450 million on average, and even a cheaper rocket such as the Falcon 9 costs ~$50 million. And yet that is completely ignoring one of the most important details of modern spaceflight—reusability. Rockets such as Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, Blue Origin's New Shepard, and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy all reuse their first stage, and booster stages in the case of the Falcon Heavy, rather than expending them (Rockets use multiple stages which separate to get rid of excess weight). And future rockets such as SpaceX’s Starship, Relativity Space’s Terran R, and possibly Blue Origin’s New Glenn will be fully reusable, meaning that for the first time in history, no new parts will be needed to launch a rocket to space, only fuel. And this could decrease costs by orders of magnitude, giving a far larger group of people and organizations access to space. SpaceX’s starship, for example, could launch over 100 tons to space for around $10 million or less, making it as powerful as the Saturn V or SLS for a hundredth the cost.

And this brings me to my final point, for which I want you to guess what percentage of the federal budget goes to NASA. I will add a note that most people believe the number to be somewhere around 20% of the federal budget (As of 2003). As well as that, I would like you to think about what percentage of the federal budget should go to NASA.