Space Exploration: More Than Just Dollars

Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost? A Freakonomics Quorum, NY Times

“Keith Cowing, founder and editor of NASAWatch.com and former NASA space biologist. … Right now, all of America’s human space flight programs cost around $7 billion a year. That’s pennies per person per day. In 2006, according to the USDA, Americans spent more than $154 billion on alcohol. We spend around $10 billion a month in Iraq. And so on. Are these things more important than human spaceflight because we spend more money on them? Is space exploration less important? Money alone is not a way to gauge the worthiness of the cost of exploring space.”