In the aftermath of the very exciting landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars, I’ve been noticing a trend on social media of people complaining about the money spent on the program to get a rover to Mars. This might be because the month of February has seen a lot of very big news on Mars itself. Earlier in February the UAE and China successfully had Mars orbiters of their own arrive, which will give us further international study of the red planet.
For a while I saw #InsteadOfGoingToMars trending. Admittedly, this was mostly people repudiating the trend by pointing out that there was far, far more to be made from exploring Mars and the solar system than there was by ignoring it or not spending the money. Most of these made excellent points that, from the computers and smart phones we use to the weather watching and mass communications satellites that orbit the Earth, we’ve gained exponentially more from exploring outer space than we’ve lost from it.
This said, I think there’s a point even in the, in my opinion, wrong idea that we’re wasting money on space exploration.
Admittedly, some of the umbrage does come from social activists bitter that billions are spent on a single Mars rover while millions are jobless and starving. While that’s understandable, it misses a fine point that in the US, NASA’s budget is less than 0.5 of a percentage point. Much more is actually spent on things like Medicare and Infrastructure than NASA as a whole. The efficiency of that spending is of course open to question, but that’s another matter.
Perhaps another problem in optics of a 2 billion dollar rover is that many big tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are very gung ho to spend hundreds of millions of their own wealth on space projects such as Space X or Blue Origin, but in turn spending little on their employees, dodging taxes, and eating up government subsidies. It’s also another thing that, while great for space exploration, is very problematic for the average person.
Allow me though, to steer the conversation away from that for a moment. There’s many people naturally upset by headline eating billionaires potentially dictating the future of space to us. There’s a far more immediate and justifiable upset to compare with the Perseverance rover though, and that would be the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford.
The Ford class carriers cost roughly 12.8 billion dollars each, or enough to build five Mars rovers with the complexity of the Perseverance. Put more succinctly, over 50% of NASA’s 2020 budget which was 22.6 billion. It’s actually going to cost more to build Ford‘s two next sisters than it would to fund a single year of NASA’s operations. And we’re not even getting into the costs of the planes it would carry!
In a fun video from a few years back, YouTuber Second Thought did a delightful speculation on what NASA could do with the US military budget. Suffice to say, it’s quite a lot. The amount that could be diverted from the US military budget to other spending and still be ahead its close rivals is truly immense. I could go on about how money spent on even an aircraft carrier might be better used on infrastructure or even a better shuttle program, but I think my point is clear.
Instead of worrying how much it costs to get a rover to Mars, we would be much better off worrying how much it costs to build a missile lobbed from an expensive warship to blow someone up half a world away. Rockets after all, can be used for much more interesting things.
Matthew Stienberg 