Today, NASA awarded almost 7 billion USD in two contracts for manned spaceflight. One to Boeing, the other to SpaceX. Thats a lot of money. I am sure that in the coming days, youll hear a lot about why this is a waste of money that can better be spent doing lots of other things. $7B is between three and four days worth of the money we spend on the military every year, for a frame of reference. Also, you may wonder what we get out of space exploration. Ive had a lot of people ask me What has all of this money ever done for me? * If youve ever been in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital, youve probably been hooked up to machines developed from the ones that kept some of the first astronauts alive. * We have cochlear implants because of NASA research into electronic sensing systems. * Scratch-resistant eyeglasses have a coating that was originally developed to cover astronauts space helmet visors * The insulin pump is a direct descendant of the early sensor systems made to remotely monitor astronauts health in space * The camera in the Hubble Space Telescope uses a technology called CCD which was used as the basis for enhanced breast cancer screening * Invisible braces for teeth are actually a reuse of a material created to protect antennae on missile trackers * The 10,000 mile tires on your car last that long because they have a fibrous material that was originally developed for the parachute on the Viking space probe that went to Mars in 1976 Whats going to be next? We wont know until we make it. And we cant learn unless we do. This is helping us grow in technology and culture. The future is going to be awesome.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 02:05:11 +0000
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