By Alex Shulski
Staff Writer

Space programs… We pay for them with our daily taxes, they are very secretive, and they seem extremely useless considering what the government does with them. But are they? The answer is no. Space is an important part of our society no matter what the public thinks.

NASA goes a long way towards improving our daily lives with their extraordinary experiments. It allows the country to experiment under something called microgravity. Microgravity is a great environment to eliminate a factor that could improve or delay the way certain things work. That factor is gravity.
Experiments in space can lead to much more things being developed or discovered. Some things that were created in space became medicines. Other benefits of space could include more understanding of the human body. Not only do these facts prove to be interesting, but they’re useful too. As more and more understanding occurs, even greater achievements could occur.

Technology in things such as computers would improve if more breakthroughs were made in space, or maybe it would allow us to constantly use light energy or solar panels as a power source on the moon. Perhaps America could even send miners up to space to keep the economy well balanced once enough improvements were made. Metals inside of asteroids or on the moon are very valuable and can boost America’s economy if they could just be recovered.

Actually, only a very minimal amount of taxes actually fund NASA’s projects, so it is not overpriced considering all of the benefits they provide. The maximum ever sent to them was less than nine dollars from every person in the U.S. All of the money accumulated from everyone could make a difference, but nine dollars from everyone is not too much to complain about. On the other hand, about 42% of taxes go towards education.

Recently there have been a struggle with NASA’s work. President Obama decided to ‘shut down’ all space shuttle launchings in the U.S. so operations will have to continue on ‘borrowed equipment,’ that will most likely cost less right now, but in the long run may put some serious pressure on the U.S. economy.
This may force a future president to raise taxes to keep this program going. As one might expect, since NASA has been running for about 30 years, it will continue its work to complete tests and analysis’s to help people to understand more about the world that we’re dealing with and will not squander our precious tax money.