• Question: Space exploration or no space exploration? Do you believe that it would be pragmatic to continue spending millions on these expensive NASA missions or perhaps fund exploring our own planet a little more instead?

    Asked by Katie to Greg, Jen, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      That’s a really good question, and I think there is value in doing a bit of everything. We really have no idea what we might find by exploring space, but the same goes for exploring our own planet. We should cast our net far and wide and explore as much as we can and see what we can discover!

      Another benefit of space exploration in particular is some of the technology that is invented that then goes on to have other uses. Here is a recent article highlighting just some technologies that were originally developed for space exploration and have found other uses, but others include cameras in smartphones, and some medical imaging technologies: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4796

    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      I think space is really fascinating, so I’d definitely want to keep exploring somehow. You never know what you might find. It’s important that we keep doing ‘blue sky’ research, as some of our most useful and important discoveries have turned up in unexpected places.

      I do think that unmanned missions are the future though. The height of manned space exploration was back in the Cold War, when America and Russia wanted to get to the moon, mainly to show each other who was better. We’ve done that now and the next step is getting to Mars, which would be hideously expensive and take several years out of the astronauts lives, so I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I’d prefer to send some unmanned space probes into properly deep space, to see what we can find out there.

    • Photo: Jen Lowe

      Jen Lowe answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I think both are important. While it may seem that space exploration is not that useful to us on earth so many discoveries are made that can also help us understand our own planet better and technologies used for space travel are also useful on earth – remote health monitoring devices for example.
      https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

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