Why should we spend money on NASA when we already have so many problems here on Earth?
If somebody asked you this question,
how would you answer?
It's been nearly five years since I left
But I came back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory today to help answer this tough question
But before I even get to the five reasons I think we should spend money on NASA
I need to clear one thing up. What percentage of the US budget
Do you think goes to NASA? According to polls most Americans think it's 20 percent so it should come as no surprise
That one in four Americans think that NASA's budget should be reduced.
If you say the total budget represents a dollar or 100 pennies
The truth is NASA gets less than one-half of one penny.
For comparison, 16% goes to the military and 60% goes to social programs like Social Security, unemployment, Medicare and health care.
Okay, so if that is our foundation
Let me give you five incredible things that we get in return for that half a percent or less than nine dollars a year for most Americans
Just like some might ask
Why should we spend time exploring space when we have so many problems here on Earth? Some of our ancestors probably asked
"Why should we waste time trying to figure out agriculture when we have so much work to do hunting and gathering?" or
"Why should we spend so much time messing around in boats when we have so many issues here on the land?"
And the answer to all three of these questions is the same:
Reaching for new heights often creates new solutions and opportunities for people back on the ground, and I have some personal experience with this concept
As most of you guys know by now,
I spent seven of my nine years here at NASA working on the
Curiosity rover in fact some of my hardware is still working like a champ on the top deck of the rover
I'll be it a little dirtier since I touched it last but for my last two years here
I worked on a much lesser known project called SMAP and in some ways
I'm more proud of what it represents because SMAP is a super complex Earth orbiting satellite. Here's how it works.
Once it's in orbit the antenna boom is deployed and in this 20 foot gold mesh reflector
Origamis out like one of those Hoberman's sphere toys, and then the whole thing starts freaking spinning at 15 rpm
And it's using a Radiometer that can see through the clouds to measure the soil moisture levels on earth
This is important because soil moisture is one of the key vital signs of the planet.
By measuring the moisture levels in the soil, it allows you to predict droughts,
monitor floods and even predict crop yields for a given year and because the antenna spins around like that,
you're able to measure all the soil on Earth every two to three days.
So I left before it actually launched in 2015,
so the reason I am here today is to follow up with some SMAP research scientists to see how things turned out
I've been to many countries in Africa. People know about SMAP and the national government of those countries are trying to use it especially
for drought especially for crop monitoring. So NASA has a data access policy of you know making it free for everybody
There are three major cereal crop on the earth
wheat, rice and corn. If you can forecast these three major crops
So you know 70-80 percent of you know forecast you can do the crop field of the whole world. What Narenda is saying here is
Remarkable to me, and it sums up my first point perfectly SMAP costs to 900 million dollars
Africa is the continent with the most extreme poverty today. I did the math and for 900 million dollars
You could feed all of Africa for less than a day
But instead we invested in research and technology which empowers them to better help themselves
Increasing the amount of food they can make on their own
For decades as opposed to a one-time fleeting handout. Of the 37 missions currently running at JPL
I think it's so cool that about half are studying and helping earth, just like SMAP
This is a fancy way of saying
We should be doing everything within our power to make sure that nothing catastrophically bad happens to us
Hollywood got this right when they said that a large asteroid impact would be really bad news. Now the chances of this happening are small
But the potential consequences are so large just ask these guys
It makes sense to take it seriously. NASA has already put an asteroid early warning detection system in place and in October
2022 for the first time ever they will test ramming a
Spacecraft into an asteroid to see if you can deflect it off course with a mission called DART
But perhaps an even bigger threat to humans are humans
one of the goals of all of the Rovers that we sent to Mars is to gather data on what
It would take for humans to live there
Establishing a permanent human outpost on Mars would serve sort of like a backup hard drive for your computer in case something catastrophically bad
happened here on earth
America's first satellite was built here at JPL and now satellites make it so we can get GPS
driving directions on our phone or get TV beamed down to us from space or predict the path of hurricanes with much greater accuracy
Theword pixel in the concept of the first digital camera was also invented at JPL in the
1960s when an engineer was trying to solve how to get pictures of the planets and send them back to earth
In fact there are nearly
2,000 NASA technology spin-offs
We don't know what we don't know and so expecting NASA to justify its funding
But predicting all the amazing things it will discover would be like
Expecting Christopher Columbus when he was lobbying Queen Isabella for ships to predict the polio vaccine or Netflix
Of the 18 billion that NASA gets it's not like they're just putting that money on a rocket and launching it into space
The Majority of that money goes towards the salaries of
Tens of thousands of some of America's most skilled workers and one of the counter arguments here is yeah
But why do we need the government to fund these programs?
Why not let private companies do the innovating? Private space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin are awesome
And they play an important role
But they're incentivized to pursue technologies that will give them a return on investment like space tourism or asteroid mining or launching satellites for other
organizations
there's just no incentive for a private company to invest in tracking and
Deflecting asteroids or investing in earth science missions like SMAP and then making the data
Available for free to anyone who needs it. So to recap for that less than half a penny from a dollar
Investment in NASA, not only do we improve life on Earth through projects like SMAP and protect ourselves against really catastrophic
Events and discover other incredible technologies to improve our lives along the way
But the money to make all that happen
goes back into growing the economy through the salaries of all the smart people doing their work. And my fifth and final reason why we
Should spend money on NASA even when we still have unsolved problems here on earth is perhaps the most important even if less concrete
Think it's captured best by what some call the most important picture ever taken
What you see here is the result of a 10-day exposure image from the Hubble Deep Space
Telescope with the exception of these three dots which are single stars
Every speck, smudge, and spiral you see in this image is a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars
Just like our own Milky Way galaxy
Most remarkably the field of view captured here is the darkest part of the night sky the size of Roosevelt's eye on a dime
Held at arm's length we send men to the moon and orbiters to Saturn and Rovers to Mars
Not necessarily because there's some financial incentive or some quick payoff
We're looking to exploit, but because as humans there are fundamental burning questions we're eager to answer
The first person to set foot on Mars is alive right now. They could be in junior high or high school
He or she could be watching this video right now
It could be you I feel that our continued exploration of space in all its forms
fills me with hope and inspires me to reach higher and makes me a better person