NASA budget cuts abandon human spirit of exploration

Our reality is shaped by the stories we tell each other, by our aspirations, by our dreams and the realities we choose to create from them. Our world and its peripheries are defined by our ability to reach out and explore, to go where no man has ever gone before.

I think that we have stopped dreaming. We have stopped exploring.

Space: the infinite, unknown frontier. At one point in time, space used to be the ultimate goal for humanity. Nations worked tirelessly to win the space race. People died to reach space. We almost went to war over space.

In 2011, the United States gave up our transport to space. The shuttle program was cut by NASA because it was deemed expensive and unnecessary. This was previously the United States’s primary method of transport to outer space. These days the U.S. “hitches” rides to orbit at Russian launch sites or via private shuttles from companies like SpaceX.

This year Congress cut $200 million of NASA’s budget. This comes after hundreds of millions being cut year after year by “reprioritizations” and “budget allocations” brought on by our constant debt crises. Earth Science space technology like satellites and Earth-observing missions have been cut along with Astrophysics and larger planetary physical sciences.

The drive for the new frontier is not being lost simply because of budget cuts, Congressional gridlock or the last round of midterm elections. Our national budget mirrors our values. It’s no coincidence that the U.S. spends more on the military than the next 10 countries put together. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Space is an infinite frontier. Space is liberty, and we have abandoned our pursuit of it partially to continue to fund our preposterously large military. Overwhelming foreign policy commitments are keeping U.S. leadership eyes on the ground and away from the clouds.

We have this phenomenon in the U.S. which isn’t seen in most parts of the world. We have tunnel vision — we only look to what is going on in our lives during that specific instant in time. We pay attention to what TV show we are going watch later tonight or what homework assignment is due later this week. We focus on ourselves and what is around us instead of looking outward. We are completely satisfied living in our microcosm.

What happened to our desire to explore? What happened to our ability to dream of new places? What happened to comic books filled with caricatures of Martian children invading Earth? Are the three hours of Interstellar a replacement for the thousands of hours our parents spent on these kinds of comic books?

I think that our drive to explore has been diminished by our eroding imaginations. Instead of dreaming beyond the stratosphere we content ourselves with toiling like sweatshop workers behind office desks to make minimum wage. And for what?

We work toward building up our 401(k)s and securing a good living so that we can give our children a good education. We work so that we can buy nice cars, and after that we can sell our cars so that we can buy bigger and nicer cars with mahogany interiors and XM radios. We work toward promotions in our jobs so we can leave and get better jobs with better pay that give bonuses (which we can then spend on nicer cars of course). We toil and strive just so that we can spend our retirements on golf courses. We work to build a buffer between ourselves and the challenges of the future, constantly striving to bolster ourselves from the unknown, insulating ourselves from our fears. Our future is in the stars, and we need to begin to turn our eyes upward.

What would Galileo explore? What would Copernicus come to see? With Auriga, Aquarius, Canis Major, lost in the consumption of the city.