Starving the space program

(Image credit: AFP PHOTO/Frederic J. BROWN/Getty Images)

published 24 July 2015

Success has many fathers; so do successful space missions. NASA has been basking in widespread applause over the past week, after its New Horizons probe completed a 4.67 billion–mile, 10-year journey to Pluto, revealing unexpected wonders in stunning detail. But New Horizons — like so many other proposed space missions — almost didn't happen.

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Bush administration tried to defund the Pluto mission twice. Over many decades, Congress and various presidents have cut NASA's funding from 4.3 percent of the federal budget to 0.5 percent today, severely crimping the agency's ambitions and delaying mankind's explorations of the solar system by decades. I find this sad and small-minded. For $720 million, or the cost of about three F-35 fighter jets, NASA just sent a 12-foot spaceship hurtling to the edge of the solar system at 30,000 mph, swooping to within 7,800 miles of Pluto — exactly as planned. Now New Horizons moves on to the Kuiper Belt, the birthplace of comets. What other government program produces such competence, such awe, such bang for the buck?

Our species is rightly called Homo sapiens: We are the creatures who seek to know. Our ancestors wondered what was beyond the horizon, so they wandered out of Africa and kept going until they covered the globe. Now human beings want to know how it feels to walk on Mars, if there's life in the oceans of Europa and Ganymede, and whether we have company in this unimaginably vast universe. NASA even wants to find out if a killer asteroid is headed this way. In a $3.9 trillion federal budget, surely we can find a few billion more for all that.

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William Falk is editor-in-chief of The Week, and has held that role since the magazine's first issue in 2001. He has previously been a reporter, columnist, and editor at the Gannett Westchester Newspapers and at Newsday, where he was part of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes.

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