SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

I wouldn't normally criticize my employer (!) but a recent report on The National that asked "Is NASA a waste of money?" was so astonishingly bad that I just couldn't let it go. Especially given that I sometimes have to report on space news, and I may want to actually have NASA folks return my calls.

The report, found here, had host Wendy Mesley questioning how much NASA spends and joking about how the space agency's recent "bombing of the moon" was met with yawns. She had a consumer watchdog in the U.S. suggesting that space exploration should be privatized because "the thrill of going to space is gone," and because "there's no need to go to Mars." Mesley even took to the streets of Toronto to see what passersby, including a young girl, thought of the billions spent by NASA each year (they weren't impressed).

NASA's budget, y'see, is about 40 per cent of what the U.S. spends on education, and African people could spend that money on "a snack," Mesley said. Clearly, the young children she spoke to are eminently qualified to critique fiscal policy.

To round out the debate, however, she did mention some of the technological advances NASA has supplied, include weather prediction and satellite communications. Phew, good thing we got those things.

I'm not even sure where to begin in pointing out how bad this segment was. How about with this: many people have asked whether the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (for whom we both work) is a waste of taxpayer money. It most certainly is not, but as the saying goes, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

NASA's contributions to every-day life are actually almost too numerous to count. Let's take HAACP as just one example. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points was created by Pillsbury as a thorough system for testing food safety for the moon mission back in the sixties. Over the years it has been expanded and adopted by just about every food producer in every developed country in the world. Without it, thousands or even millions of people would be getting sick or even dying from the food they ate every day.

That sure seems like a contribution worthy of what amounts to a drop in the bucket of the U.S. government's annual budget.

There are a zillion other things that have spun off from NASA research, like safer tires for our cars, solar power, just about every aeronautical invention over the past 50 years, bioreactors for developing drugs, oxygen gauges for operating rooms, sensor technology from telescopes that's used in arthroscopic surgery, even margarine (a byproduct of rocket fuel). NASA has a full database of its spinoffs, chock full of technologies and goods derived from the pursuit of space exploration.

Ultimately, NASA has more than paid for itself many times over - even if we had never set foot on the moon. And that's not even getting into how many jobs it has created over the years. It's the farthest thing from a waste of money.

UPDATE: Bob McDonald, host of CBC radio's Quirks & Quarks science program, agrees with me. As Bob puts it: "If you want to talk about ways we waste money, don’t pick on the space program."