Starting back in the 1960s, there have been those who say that we should not spend money on spaceflight until we fix problems here on earth. Frankly, I feel sorry for those who say we shouldn’t explore space. I think it is a basic human drive to be curious about the universe. But could we do more if we didn’t spend money on space?
It turns out, we have already done the experiment. Not that we dropped NASA’s budget down to zero but we did cut it in half. In the years 1964-1970 when Project Apollo was gearing up to go to the moon, the average annual budget for NASA (in 2014) dollars was about $33,000. In the years 1971 to 2017, it was $18,000 dollars. The savings computes to more than 700 billion dollars removed from NASA’s budget.
Now, I must ask this, what did we do with that “savings”? We did not cure cancer. We do have higher survivorship numbers but more people get cancer today than they did in 1970, largely due to an older population. We did not end homelessness. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units than there were low-income households. By 1985 this was switched around so that there were 3.3 million more low-income households than low-cost rental units.
We did not stop malaria. The incidence of malaria worldwide increased after 1970. We did eliminate smallpox in 1980 but in the U.S. we had virtually stopped smallpox 30 years later. In the 1960s we dropped the U.S. poverty rate from 22% to 12%. Today it is still around 12%.
Where did the 700 billion dollars go? One place was in the taxation of the rich. John Kennedy dropped the top marginal tax rate down to 70%. In the 1980s it was eventually dropped to around 40% or less. Other tax breaks, including some for the middle class, further reduced federal, state, and local revenues.
So the next time someone says the money spent on space exploration should be spent elsewhere please inform them that we have been doing that for nearly 50 years and it hasn’t helped.
Poverty rate information found at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-drops-third-consecutive-year-2017.html
Homelessness numbers found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#1980s_and_1990s
NASA budget figures found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
