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NASA FUNDING STEPHEN PASQURELLO
Every year billions upon billions of taxpayers’ dollars are invested into NASA, and the overall benefits of the organization are not apparent to the average person. The immense masses of money that are consumed by NASA don’t seem to be justified by their findings and such discoveries are not practical to our lives on earth, nor does it improve our lives. The priorities of the government can be questioned when over ten billion dollars are poured into NASA’s funding each year while poverty and crime overwhelm the country and the nation’s massive debt increases by the second. Therefore it is imperative that the government puts into perspective what is really important and to decrease the budget that NASA receives as the needs of the country increase.
17,318,000,000. That is the number of dollars that NASA will receive this year and this is nothing out of the ordinary. In the past ten years alone, NASA has collected over one hundred and sixty four billion dollars. In the fifty years of existence, NASA has embarked on many different missions and projects, two of the most famous being the Space Station and the International Space Station. Combined, the two huge projects are funded by 42% of NASA’s overall budget. Since these two projects take up the bulk of the budget they are the most susceptible to criticism and for good reason. The projects are impractical and at too high a risk. Funding for the project can be considered “financially reckless” when the costs come out to $380 per American and the chances that the station will be damaged by existing satellites or other air bourn objects is 1 in 5.
NASA has put an enormous amount of time, energy, and money into producing projects like the Space Station and International Space Station to provide an environment for people to be able to live in space. This seems like an obscure objective when the costs to support a human in space are huge and the chance of death in space are still and will always be present. The costs to engineer unmanned missions are considerable smaller, obviously provoke no deaths, can produce more, and more accurate results and can achieve equal or more than humans while in space.
Something that is more obvious than what NASA is doing with tens of billions of dollars is that there is a serious poverty issue in the United States. It has risen for four consecutive years and shows no sign of letting up. According to the HHS Poverty Guidelines a family of four that has an income of $21,200 is not considered a poor family. When taxes, bills and food factor in, that number is substantially lowered and cannot provide adequate living conditions or the necessities to everyday life like school supplies or clothes. The fact of the matter is that with the standard of living set so low it proves that there are more people than the estimated 36.5 million people that suffer from the brutality of poverty than the government wants to admit and therefore no great actions have been or will take place. The harsh truth is that the families that are in poverty will stay in poverty because there is no real hope of escaping it, and the poverty rates will continue to climb unless something is done.
6.04 billion, about 1/3 of NASA’s budget, is the amount that the FBI received in 2007 to protect our country. Crime in the country and attacks against the U.S. have proven to be a large problem in today’s world and the funds that the FBI gets to prevent these sorts of things are trumped by NASA’s. NASA has been asked by the government to plan more practical, less expensive projects and to cut staff by a small portion but they have failed to do so, stating that they would not be able to operate with a smaller annual budget and a smaller work force. They also have been asked to produce projects that will show more immediate effects rather than others that could take years to show any important information but they continue to demand large sums of money each year to pursue every idea under the sun.
As of today, April 21, 2008, the national debt of the United States stands at a tremendous $9,377,241,791,018 and since September 29, 2006 it has risen 1.53 billion dollars each day. It is an undisputable fact that this is a problem and it needs to be solved or it will only get worse. The only way for this problem to be solved is for the government to take a page out of its own book and conserve money to pay it off little by little. This will not be an instant solution but it will reduce the debt and eventual, in the very distant future will be able to be at a reasonable and maintainable amount. The reality is that if NASA was completely eliminated and the money they got was used to pay off the debt it would take over 500 years. (Assuming that they would save about 17 billion a year) The other truth is that NASA does not need that much money to operate, it can survive on a lot less than it claims to require.
What it all comes down to is will the money that the government invests in NASA all be worth it. The fact that we can find out how many stars there are in the universe or if a plant grew on Mars a million years ago is not practical information that can be applied to our lives on earth. The effects or benefits, if any, are not apparent and do not help the world, as a whole strive to be a better, more advanced population. If the government took action to reduce the amount of money that NASA receives each year they could make a significant impact on our country. By redirecting this large sum of money, the government could make real changes by the means of relieving the harshness or poverty in America, lessen the intensity of crime, and slowly pay off the country’s steadily increasing national debt. It is not a question of if NASA can spend the money giving to them it’s, isn’t there more important things the money could be used for. I think NASA can spare some change.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
"NASA Funding." Issues & Controversies On File 15 Feb. 2005. Issues & Controversies. Facts On File News Services. 31 Mar. 2008 .

Hall, Ed. U.S. National Debt Clock. 22 April 2008. 21 Apr 2008 .
"Space Station." Wikipedia. 2008. Free Software Foundation. 21 Apr 2008 .
"Poverty:2006 Highlights." U.S. Census Bureau, Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division . 21 Apr 2008 .