Bombing The Moon

This past Saturday morning, millions of people awoke early to catch a glimpse of NASA’s latest pubic relations event, the bombing of he moon. Now you may ask, “what did the moon ever do to us to deserve to be bombed?” It is not about what the moon may or may not have done to us, but it is more about the public events that NASA must continue to stage to justify it’s more than $17 billion annual budget.

Sadly for those millions who set their alarms to see the spectacular plume predicted to be created when a multi-million dollar spacecraft crashed into the moon’s surface, the show never materialized as predicted.

The purpose of this intentional lunar crash was to create a several miles high plume of lunar material that a second spacecraft would fly through sending data on the content of the material set aloft by the first crash, before self-immolating itself into the same crash site. What was the intended purpose of this spectacular and costly experiment? To determine if there is water on the moon in the form of ice below the surface. If there is water, then it would make it more feasible to colonize the moon.

This experiment and failed lunar show cost the American taxpayers approximately $604 million. I don’t recall any public debate about whether or not we could afford this amount of money during such fiscally constrained times. Nor do I recall debate about whether or not this money could have been better spent to address current needs rather than some future goal of colonizing the moon.

But while this NASA project was being implemented the public debate over whether we can afford universal health care raged on as did similar debates about the cost of extending unemployment benefits, adequately funding public education or the government’s legitimate role in funding much needed social and human services.

While we found more than $600 million to spend on determining whether or not there is water on the moon, approximately 1.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean, safe drinking water right here on earth. It is estimated that due to this lack of access to clean, safe water, 4,500 children die each day of preventable water-borne illnesses. Imagine how far $604 million could go to save just a few of those lives. According to Kofi Anan former United Nations Secretary General “we shall not finally defeat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or any other infectious diseases that plague the developing world until we have won the battle for safe drinking water, sanitation and basic health care.”

But perhaps you may say, well we have many social and health problems right here in the US affecting our people and that we should target limited dollars to these needs. Well it certainly is true that we have no shortage of issues right here at home that need to be addressed.

Let’s start with public education for example. We know that a good education is the best ticket out of poverty, we also know that fully 17% of all children under the age of 18 live in poverty (the highest child poverty rate in the developed world), yet as a result of this current fiscal crisis every state and local education budget has been cut, laying off teachers and vital support staff. If we just skipped this costly lunar experiment, the $604 million could have been used to hire 10,000 public school teachers. Imagine what impact that could have on local schools that are buckling under cutbacks that have reduced their teacher rolls.

But education is not the only factor keeping people in poverty, the cost of housing is another. Today in the US, we have learned to live with homelessness that effects more than 1 million people. While we like to cast homeless people as drunks, dope addicts and mentally ill, the fact is the single most prevalent cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. That same $604 million could have been used to produce approximately 4,500 units of affordable housing. Just a small drop in the bucket and one that would not significantly reduce the number of homeless people, but imagine the impact on those 4,500 families. I am sure it would be considerably more long lasting, and more life changing, than waking up early to witness a lunar bombing.

What about health care? The debate raging in Congress is about cost and whether or not a government-run program is desirable or would be better than our current system of private insurers. Since single-payer was taken off the table at the very beginning of the current debate, we seem to have forgotten about the 47 million Americans without health coverage. One statistic that has not found its way into the public debate are the 18,000 people who die each year in the US from preventable illnesses because they do not have access to health care. If we skipped just this one NASA moon adventure, the $604 million cost could have been used to provide one year of health coverage for about 183,000 people.

I could go on with more examples of how this money might have been spent in alternative ways that provide a direct benefit to millions of people, but I think you get the point. Instead of creating a media frenzy about the wonderful pictures that will be returned of the lunar blast, we should be engage in a discussion of national priorities. When resources are limited, how do we focus them to do the most good for the largest number of people? Unless we begin to address this basic question, we will continue to fail all basic measures of a good society, which for the US now include the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, the lowest literacy rate of all western industrialized countries, along with the highest murder rate, highest child poverty rate and the highest school drop out rate among other factors.

But we can be proud as a nation that we were the first to bomb the moon, even though we are the last in so many other measures that really count