Staff opinion: At war with our own future

Mars will have to wait, according to a budget proposal released by President Barack Obama. And it may have to wait a long time before we have a chance to finally answer a question that’s plagued us for decades.

Before he ascended into superstardom as Ziggy Stardust while America was at the height of the space race in the early 1970s, David Bowie asked if there was life on Mars. Now on the verge of launching a program with the potential to make our greatest discoveries, we’re avoiding that question again while quietly shuffling money into a war that, if it goes as planned, will end in 2014.

On Monday the New York Times reported on a budget proposal from the White House that would call for a $1.2 billion cut in NASA’s budget, all of which would come from robotic space exploration. It was an even more staggering blow for NASA, which has already withdrawn from joint missions with the European Space Agency in 2016 and 2018.

That could push us back as far as the 2030s before we can explore Mars and beyond, the director of the nonprofit Planetary Society says.

Considering our international reputation right now, cutting back on our more socially beneficial scientific endeavors just as we’re being accused of pushing for war in Iran would seem a bad public relations move at best, and a betrayal of a peaceful future at worst.

As a nation continually at war for the last decade, while enduring a crushing recession in the latter half of it, we’ve found ourselves in the unfortunate either/or position of choosing ostensible defense over social betterment and scientific achievement.

We’ve experimented with the cost of reducing spending on scientific advancement only at our own peril. By necessity we’re constantly moving forward, looking for cures for new diseases and creating technology that moves people and information faster and more efficiently.

But in war we seem crippled by mistakes of hindsight and foresight. Our weapons are more powerful than ever, yet we find ourselves in eerily similar situations compared to the war in Vietnam, yet with no better answers on how to win. We already know the cost: more than a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus the ongoing costs of interest on debt incurred to finance those wars, and the cost of caring for the wounded for decades to come.

A joint ABC News and Washington Post poll released Monday showed that 60 percent of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth its cost. That cost is about $5.3 billion per month, a substantial discount compared to earlier last year when it exceeded $7 billion per month. The total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined passed the $1 trillion barrier in November, representing a cost of more than $100 billion per year.

All of those numbers are official figures from the Pentagon comptroller’s office. Many groups, including economists from Brown University consider that $1 trillion dollar figure to be a conservative estimate. They say that the final cost will be at least $3.7 trillion.

The entire NASA program, which has in its launches into space leapt us forward into the future we have today, has cost us about half that in all of its 54 years combined. In a July 2011 CBS poll, nearly two-thirds of responders said the recently canceled space shuttle program was worth the cost. Yet given the advancements we’ve arrived at thanks to NASA, we’ve decided we’d rather not invest in the future when we’re busy doing what nearly two-thirds of Americans equate to throwing money on a fire in the Middle East.

Ten years after terrorists attacked us on our own soil, we’re still fighting an unknown enemy for fear that if we don’t, it will imperil our way of life. But when we sacrifice our future to fight a war with an uncertain conclusion, we already have.

It’s been 41 years since David Bowie asked if there was life on Mars. That was two years after we’d landed on the moon. Though our ability to reach for the stars has grown tremendously in the ensuing four decades, we still can’t seem to grasp the economics to get us off the launchpad.