Space Exploration Must Be Postponed

On October 23, 2008, British newspaper The Times published and article that discusses India's first unmanned mission to the Moon and the implications for future space exploration. India's recent space exploration has catapulted itself into likes of United States, Russia, Japan and China as the sole nations to have independently reached the Moon. India has also joined the competitive Asian space race, a race against with Japan, China, and South Korea to land a man on the moon.

India's spacecraft, entitled Chandrayaan ("moon vehicle" in Sanskrit), will first "fire a smaller spacecraft down to the Moon's surface, carrying an Indian tricolor flag." Then, Chandrayaan will orbit the moon for a full two years, and using advanced sensors, will gather information on the moons surface and composition. The results will allow scientists to determine if the moon holds enough helium3 or water to sustain human life.

Some Indian citizens were proud, but many were indignant. The article reports that in India "800 million people live on less than $2 a day and 47 per cent of children under 3 are malnourished." One citizen said "the space exploration is nothing but a gimmick." In the midst of India's problems, and given that the program costs £47 million, I think it's hard to justify their space program.

Although I truly commend and respect all space research, even colonization, I do not think that we can afford the luxury of performing a vast majority of it. If you consider that our world is marred by poverty, famines, wars, climate change and diseases, it should, hopefully, be evident to you that our billions of space dollars would be better invested into humans. Some will argue that it is one of man's noblest characteristics is our instinctive obligation to explore space, to fulfill man's curiosity. I say, and with all due respect for space research, that it is more noble to pursue a world where woman go to school, a world where 30,000 children do not die each day due to poverty, a world without diseases, without genocide, without climate change, without pollution and without hundreds of thousands dying in needless wars.

As stated, some space research, space research that directly aids humans, should continue. For example, satellites that forecast weather are valuable because they save many lives from dangerous weather, such as hurricanes. Also, space equipment that tracks global warming is essential. What should be disbanded are things like missions to other planets, which is not really beneficial to humans. For example, the Voyager missions came at a price tag of just below $1 billion. Again, with all due respect for space research, there clearly is better, more important causes to spend $1 billion than analyzing our solar system.

Some argue that much of the technology that we use came as a result of space research, and therefore, the research should continue. They are correct that space resrach has given us great technology. A good example would be fuel cells, which were developed for the Apollo missions. But I think that this is a ridiculous reason to keep space research alive. If you invest billions into any research project, your bound to have spin off technologies arise. If we inject the entirety of the space program's funding into cancer research instead, we would, undoubtedly, have similar technological spin offs, and, perhaps, a cure to cancer.

Dr T.K. Alex, who is in charge of the Indian space project, said, "Man has to go to the Moon. If something happens to Earth, a natural or man-made disaster, we may also need a colony on Mars."

I strongly disagree with Dr Alex's statement. Colonization an impractical solution to the world's problems. There are better, more pragmatic approaches to solving our problems. If we are over populated, we need to control population. If global warming threatens us, we need to work on preventing it, not reacting to it by simply evading to another colony. If there is a wide spread disaster, as Dr Alex was concerned about, we must deal with it here on earth. Disbanding earth in favor of colonization is simply unrealistic. It consumes too much resources and takes too long.

Space research, however valuable, does not trump basic human needs. India spent £47 million on Chandrayaan. Would this money have been better spent fighting the poverty and diseases that run rampant? Yes. In the United States, would NASA's annual budget of $17.3 billion be better spent granting health care to 46 million uninsured Americans, or to fight poverty abroad? It would.