Kortney Mayorga
Solar System Astronomy
03/19/2016

Not Worth It?

Traveling to uncharted lands and expanding territory is what humans have been doing for centuries. Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark—all traveling the globe to explore. It only makes sense that once the world has been identified that we continue our exploration further into a world beyond our own… Right? Wrong. Traveling to destinations where you know people could possibly or already do exist is much different than traveling to a place where you know that a human would not survive. Both dangerous and risky, not only are you putting a person’s life at risk willingly, but you’re paying billions of dollars—money that could be used on society or other sciences that are much less dangerous—to do it. That’s right; despite the fact that supposedly space exploration prices are at an “all-time low” right now, financially, what does that really look like? Picture the Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona, a structure of pure concrete 726 feet tall. Now picture eight-hundred of them. That’s the cost of a space exploration trip to Mars at the moment. To afford this kind of exploration would require the cutting of health-care benefits, education spending, or tax raising. In the end, many of those that never asked for this trip to be done would be paying for it. It almost makes more sense to just put all the money you own in a rocket and send it up in space to see what would happen—that’s basically what we would be doing anyways. With current technology and prices, a trip just doesn’t make sense right now. That isn’t to say that it isn’t possible in the future! After a few years or a decade or so, more research would have been done and new launch systems developed that would make the trip much more reliable and affordable. More research would be done on Mars, and it’s even possible NASA would find another planet they’d rather explore. Or, if the researches would be willing to privately foot the bill and raise funds for the exploration, then so be it. However, a trip to Mars and an increased Billion dollar debt is not what the country needs at the moment, and most definitely not worth it today. In the future, however, that’s another story we’ll have to wait and read.

References
Easterbrook, Gregg. "Why We Shouldn't Go To Mars." Do We Have Our PRIORITIES Straight? (2004): 4-7. Why We Shouldn't Go To Mars. TIME, 26 Jan. 2004. Web. 17 Mar. 2016.