By Raphael Hon
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 3, 1997

Feed the hungry, not NASA

Editor:

Ah, the sins of space exploration! What good can come out of sending a small robot (which looks more like a remote control rover) to a distant planet sending us information most of us couldn't care less about. We do not even look at our own footsteps, let alone investigate the content of a rock in a planet millions of miles away...

Asking whether we should explore space is like asking a mountaineer why climb a mountain. However, we need a little more than "because it's there" to justify spending millions of dollars which could go to better causes.

What's the big deal about Mars, the Moon or other galaxies? Apart from the Moon, few can identify which is which in the sky. All of the planets in our solar system are not going to be popular tourist resorts. The nearest star is 4.3 light years away, and we still do not have the technology to travel at one thousandth the speed of light. Unless you believe Mr. Hotair who said he was captured by an UFO and brought to the distant galaxy Nobraincells, we may as well face it! We are marooned on this blue planet we call Earth, though it is not entirely a bad thing.

Borrowing a line from Bette Midler's tune, it seems we have everything we need on earth. Some of us have more, some not enough, but it's certainly not Mother Earth's fault. So why do we want to venture out into the cold, inhospitable, and dangerous places? Even more important is why do we spend so much of our scarce resources doing so? Technically speaking though, we didn't really spend that much, we just redistributed the money to the scientists, engineers, and contractors of the space program.

Nevertheless, that money could have gone to feed the hungry, heal the sick and shelter the poor. There is little doubt the money will be better spent on the more pressing needs of our society.

Raphael Hon
Aerospace and mechanical engineering graduate student