There was a lot more other key, long-sought after data derived from the WMAP project, which can be found here. All of these findings are key to understanding one of the most fundamental questions humanity has asked for millennia: how did the world begin?
There's more. One of the foremost blogosphere experts on space exploration, Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams, who recently moderated a panel on space exploration for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, predicts that we will learn the following about planets outside our solar system in the next thirteen years:
Where will we be in the exoplanet hunt by the year 2020? A few of my own guesses would take this form: We should, within even the next year or two, have detected a terrestrial world in a truly unambiguous position within the habitable zone of a star. That star will doubtless be a red dwarf, like Gliese 581, but we can hope for a result that doesn't lend itself to so many conflicting interpretations. The detection method will surely be planetary transit, but even by 2020 we may not know if life exists there.
It's also easy to surmise that by 2020 we'll have a terrestrial-class world located within a stellar system not completely dissimilar to our own; i.e., one involving a star much like the Sun, orbited by a rocky world in the habitable zone. We can hope that by 2020 the tools will have been put in place to do spectroscopic observations of the planetary atmospheres involved in small rocky worlds, though so much depends on budgets and the needed tuning up of exquisitely sensitive technologies.
In other words, through NASA research, we are getting tantalizingly close, possibly only fifteen or twenty years, to answering another fundamental question facing humanity: are we alone in the universe?
These are just two of the major projects in which NASA is engaged. If you ask me, NASA's budget of $17.3 billion is a bargain to answer questions like these. At less than 1% of our federal budget, and about one tenth of one percent of our gross national income, how can it not be worth it to understand how the universe started, how our solar system formed, and if there is life outside the solar system? I know that funding for space exploration has long been an easy target for those wishing to spend federal money on other programs, but can't we find the money from corporate welfare, Iraq and military spending, and Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy? Is figuring out where we came from and whether or not we are alone in the universe really less important than, say, bailing out a few private, airline companies? Really, really? How about monitoring global warming? How about inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers? Or how about NASA's work to discover breakthrough propulsion, which only cost $1.6M dollars, but could potentially lead to a breakthrough source of energy on Earth? Or even how about massive solar energy plants in space? In addition to the international cooperation that space exploration helps foster, aren't even pictures of Earth from low orbit a wonderfully unifying bit of human art?
I know that, apart from the 18,000 high tech jobs in NASA, none of these are direct benefits to humanity. However, there are many indirect benefits, not to mention the potential for massive future benefits, too. I also don't care about stupid ideas from Bush like sending a manned mission to Mars or establishing a permanent base on the Moon. We just are not at a technological point where human exploration of space outside of low Earth orbit makes much sense. We might as well establish a permanent colony in the Gobi desert if we want to permanently establish one on the moon, since both have about the same benefit. However, I do worry about a future when cutting funding from NASA becomes a vogue means of paying for any new government project, thus making all of the benefits I described above more difficult to obtain. While releasing his education plan today, Barack Obama included cutting some NASA funding as a means of paying for the program:
Though Obama called for a renewed investment in math and science education, his plan would actually pull money from the federal government's greatest investments and achievements in math and science. Obama would delay funding for the NASA Constellation program for five years, though he would maintain the $500 million in funding the program would receive for its manufacturing and technology base, in order to help fund his education policy. The campaign did not say how much money delaying the program would provide.
The plan would also be paid for through the auctioning off of surplus public land, closing the CEO pay deductibility loophole, reduce costs of standardized procurement and through the some of the money that would be saved by ending the war in Iraq.
In some ways, I don't think this is fair. If NASA funding is weighed against increased funding for early childhood education, there simply isn't anyway that NASA can win. Then again, I don't think anything could win a public opinion fight against increased funding for pre-school education. It just doesn't feel fair to compare the two. It just isn't a fair comparison.
Obama isn't alone on this, I know that NASA funding isn't ever going to become a major campaign issue, and that no candidate will suffer a real blow for proposing to cut back on it a little bit. But at the very least, if all of the other reasons I have given here don't work for the next President, don't all Presidents at least want to appear forward-looking? If you want to change the mission of NASA to move away from human exploration of space, that's fine. However, please don't cut NASA's budget, just redirect it to other space-related projects with more obvious potential benefit (and there are many of those). There is so much good that can be, and is being, accomplished through NASA. Let's not cut funding to such a great area of human discovery. |
