Phoenix Mars Mission: Value for Money or a Waste?

[Steve Gardner]

Four days after landing on Mars, Nasa's lander, Phoenix, is about to begin testing the planet's soil for the building blocks of life.

The craft, which took over nine and half months to travel from the Earth to Mars, is part of a project said to have cost an estimated $457 million (source: San Francisco Chronicle).

In the current uncertain economic climate, is this money well spent or a misallocation of funds?

[niemz]

I am for the funding of the exploration of space. If the government needs to cut spending, there are plenty of other areas where more money is spent, like $400 for a toilet seat, etc.

[Jack]

I believe that it's a good idea to have the funding for the exploration of space as it's right for us to have the knowledge of what is out there. Obviously, there are ways of cutting spending as mentioned by Niemz (above) and this would cut down the costs that are being spent.

So, overall I think the government should have the funding for exploration in space

[Steve Gardner]

This is a comment I made elsewhere over 18 months ago on a similar topic of discussion. My view remains broadly the same now.

On the face of it, our investment in space can be made to look rather frivolous when we're reminded of the suffering that many millions of people around the world have to endure.

When you look at it a little more carefully, however, space exploration has greatly enhanced the world we live in and will continue to do so. Just as, if not more importantly, there are plenty of other candidate budgets we should look to trim before we look at the space budget.

For me, defence is the key one. The US Defense Department has a $441 billion budget for 2007. Globally, we spend around $1 trillion on defence. Compare that to the space programme: NASA's 2007 budget is $16.8 billion, which is around 30% of the $60 billion we spend on space programmes globally.

I'm a little unsure about what we get for our 'defense dollars', being inclined to think, for example, that 'the war on terrorism' is a rather phoney one. I'm much clearer about what we get for our 'space dollars'.

Without a space programme we'd have no satellites. The world's single biggest commercial application for satellite technology is, of course, TV, which generates around $50 billion of revenue globally per year. Other telecommunications revenues combine to push annual global satellite-based service revenues well over the $65 billion mark.

Does anyone believe we should decommission our satellites and lose the breadth of services and wealth of content they provide? If the answer to that point is ‘no’, then almost by default, you are in favour of the space programme, since the lion's share of the global space budget is spent supporting this space infrastructure, with only a relatively small amount allocated to the Phoenix-like 'deep space' projects.

And we haven’t even touched on the serendipitous spin-offs that space R&D has given us. NASA's error correction coding technology has been used in the development of the humble CD. TV and telephone compression technology, which has its roots in NASA's wireless compression research, has enabled us to shove more content into homes and businesses without massive infrastructure upgrades. Magnetic imaging and hi-tech surgical instrumentation all owe a debt of gratitude to the space programme. I could go on.

In sum, I'd rather rid the world of a few bombs, planes and submarines to finance the humanitarian effort than loose the medium by which we all educated about the need for a humanitarian effort.