The Pros And Cons Of NASA Budgeting

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Recommended: History of the American Space Program

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, is a key aspect to the United States and the world in so many more ways than people realize. They help protect the us with satellites to monitor the Earth and what is going on with it that we can not see, they help out our country as well as the rest of the world and the everyday lives of the people, and they help inspire and grow the minds of the youth in our world today. They do this all and much more with a miniscule budget, think of what they could accomplish if given double or triple their current budget. This may seem a little overkill and it may be argued that they would never use this and the budget should even be lowered, but that is not the case at all. Currently NASA's budget …show more content…

For comparison, 16% goes to the military and 60% goes to social programs like Social Security, unemployment, Medicare and health care.” (Rober) In the recent years there has been occasional increases in NASA's overall budget but these are so small they really aren’t doing much to help out this government program. NASA has variety of purposes like protecting the U.S. as well as the Earth as a whole. First off NASA helps with protecting not only our country but also the Earth as a whole. NASA has multiple satellites that are used for monitoring weather here on Earth as well as watch for outside threats that we may not even realize how dangerous they could be. NASA has 26 different Earth observation satellite systems that are currently in operation (Platnick). These 26 are a part of NASA's Earth Science division. Each one of these has a different purpose meant to monitor Earth, and to help protect and preserve things on it. The purpose of these satellites range from monitoring polar ice caps and how they are shrinking, to being able to measure soil moisture …show more content…

For many of NASA's projects the technology known at the time wasn’t always good enough, or might not have been as cost effective as they needed. Because of this NASA would then invent new technology to suit what they need, and a lot of this is being used in the world around you. Many people don’t even realize this. The number of things they have made that we use everyday is a lot more than some may think. A few inventions that came out of NASA’s work include cameras on phones, scratch resistant lenses, LEDs (Light-emitting diodes), water and air purification systems, memory foam, wireless headphones, and much more (Nelson). People may argue that we would have invented these things sooner or later, so why is it such a big deal that NASA invented them. This could be considered a valid argument, but there is no way of really knowing when it would have been invented, and we could be much less technically advanced than we are today. Not only that but the work NASA does can help underdeveloped countries with their daily lives through things such as water purifiers or with programs such as SMAP. Clean water is essential for life and yet many countries around the world and mainly in Africa do not have easy access to it. An article found on NASA's website states “a deep-water well failure in the tiny Kurdish village of Kendala, Iraq,

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