It is a nightmare for the scientists and the engineers that they receive such news for their preciously worked-up rocket. Although this rocket may not have been harmful to anyone of Earth as it crashed in the Indian Ocean, the test of Russia’s new rocket booster failed.
Each mission costs millions of dollars and even though the re-entry into the atmosphere wasn’t catastrophic for the residents, it still is a nightmare for the ones who put their heart and soul into a mission like this. As the astronomer Jonathan McDowell says “To be clear, I do NOT regard this object as a significant risk”-it was only the destruction of a new testing engine.
The race to space has been going on for decades and we have been more accurate and efficient in it than each previous launch. The increasing number of competitors in this race including SpaceX, Blue Origin and countries like China and Russia…might be causing another US-Soviet like science war. Is it a good thing?
Is the Race to Space Worth it?
On October 4th, 1957 Russia inaugurated the space war with a country well-occupied enough to combat it, USA. The launch of the first man-made Satellite into the space, Sputnik-1 was the success and the start of the new era of possibilities and theories.
Since then, the “race to space” has only expanded with more competitors to take the “firsts in space” and the flood of younger generations in the field of astronomy, cosmology, aeronautics, avionics etc. has only outnumbered each previous year.
The destruction of recent Russian rocket rises the debate of either space exploration being a lucrative industry to invest in or not. The arguments rise from all over the world from the public that pays for those operations.
Where is it leading us? And considering it took Voyager-1 to take twelve years to only reach Jupiter, even with sixty years of knowledge about space, it will still take James Webb Space Telescope a month to reach only Lagrange-2-how far and for how long can we go with that?
The recent development of technology that give us better comprehension of the nature and specially space travels, we still might be a couple thousand years behind the technology that might and just might let us do the long-distance space travel to outer galaxies. Theoretically possible, but considering the fundings that each launch takes is huge and could be more valuable on earth-as many say.
Is the race to space worth it? I don’t know.
How long till we can reach our ultimate goal from space, which is to find another Earth-like planet? A couple thousand years of technological development I must say.
Is the fund that goes into Space Exploration should be redirected towards the world’s health and prosperity?
Taking an example from Russia’s GDP from 2020 which is 1.483 trillion USD and their annual spending, which marks up to 2.77 billion USD. It only makes up to 1.8% of annual spending’s on the space exploration.
So, can we spend that portion of the budget to improve human lives and cure diseases? Yeah, we can but…is there enough amount to do both? Russia spent 3.5% of its GDP only in the health sector. So yeah, there’s enough amount to pursue the dream to space and get the quality of this earth stabled concurrently.
