While on one end India has over 8 crore people living in extreme poverty, on the other the Indian Government has allotted over ₹ 13,949 crore (about 1.9 Billion USD) for space exploration in the 2021-22 budget. With no visible effect or improvement in the daily life of an average tax-paying citizen, it may seem like a waste of our money. But is space research more helpful than you may have ever realised?
Uses of Space Programs on daily life
Many of our modern-day technologies are based around space - GPS, Weather Analysis and prediction, telecommunications. They are necessary for the functioning of our modern society. They extensively help farmers through soil analysis and precipitation calculating satellites.
Economic Gain
With resource depletion and environmental destruction increasing on earth due to various economic and industrial factors, space offers a great alternative to many of them including mining. There have been identified many asteroids in the asteroid belt with a significant amount of metals like Iron, Gold, Platinum, Zinc that could benefit human beings as explorers.
Biological Limitations
However it is also important to remember that human beings have their own biological limitations. Space is a novel world that our bodies are not originally designed to travel in. Not all of homo sapiens can sustain the physical and mental strain of space travel. The space environment—with its very low level of gravity, lack of atmosphere, wide temperature variations, and often high levels of ionising radiation from the Sun, from particles trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts, and from cosmic rays—is an unnatural place for humans. An understanding of the effects on the human body of spaceflight, particularly long-duration flights away from Earth to destinations such as Mars, is incomplete.
Many astronauts and cosmonauts have suffered from “space sickness” causing vomiting, stomach ache and nausea. The space sickness reduces and eventually disappears in 2-3 days of stay in space. However, the real challenge is posed when these individuals return the earth.
The experience of zero or less gravity decreases the bone mass of astronauts, especially in the heart. Such a person on earth runs a greater risk of breaking a bone during normal strenuous activity. Astronauts may take varying amount of time to acclimatise with Earth’s gravity. Exposure to high levels of solar radiation or cosmic rays could cause potentially fatal tumours and other health problems. Biomedical advances are also necessary to develop methods for the early detection and mitigation of radiation damage. Nevertheless, the effects of radiation may remain a major obstacle to long human voyages in space. It might be possible for professional astronauts to overcome these issues in future, but space travel of thousands of people still remains a dream.
In the middle of all these biological complication for human spaceflight, we have “selfless” billionaires like Elon Musk claiming to put a million people on Mars by 2050. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Not even one thousand people have been to space yet, and considering the economic and biological difficulties, Musk’s claim is next to impossible.
Political Agendas to Space
"Science was the beneficiary of a human spaceflight mission that was undertaken for geopolitical purposes.”
-Dr. Ian A. Crawford, Planetary Scientist
Another challenge to space travel is that it has often been driven by political agendas. The misuse of space research to gain political popularity has been a sixty-year old practice going on since the space race.
NASA's budget peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s. After the United States won the race to the Moon, space exploration lost political support and NASA's budget was cut significantly. NASA received 4.41% of US Annual budget in 1966. This percentage sharply dropped in the following decade consists of mere 0.52% of Annual Budget in 2021. Does this reflect to the fact that space exploration and the Moon mission was used simply as a political tool in Space Race to the Moon during the Cold War era?
The Inquisitive Mankind
From the first tribes that left Africa 85,000 years ago to the first man who set foot on the moon, we have come a long way. There is something fundamental about us that makes us ponder, “Where did we come from?” “Are we alone in the universe?” Sure, we have problems on Earth but there are many that have been solved in the past half century and many more that will be solved. Our ability and desire to explore, to discover, to solve is what drives the human race forward.
I appreciate the articulation and clarity of the article. I’m intrigued to know more about this. How are billionaires like Bezos and Branson on the edge of making space travel accessible to normal people, not considering the exorbitant price?