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Why should we spend money on NASA when we already have so many problems here on Earth?

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If somebody asked you this question,

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how would you answer?

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It's been nearly five years since I left

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But I came back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory today to help answer this tough question

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But before I even get to the five reasons I think we should spend money on NASA

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I need to clear one thing up. What percentage of the US budget

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Do you think goes to NASA? According to polls most Americans think it's 20 percent so it should come as no surprise

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That one in four Americans think that NASA's budget should be reduced.

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If you say the total budget represents a dollar or 100 pennies

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The truth is NASA gets less than one-half of one penny.

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For comparison, 16% goes to the military and 60% goes to social programs like Social Security, unemployment, Medicare and health care.

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Okay, so if that is our foundation

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Let me give you five incredible things that we get in return for that half a percent or less than nine dollars a year for most Americans

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Just like some might ask

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Why should we spend time exploring space when we have so many problems here on Earth? Some of our ancestors probably asked

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"Why should we waste time trying to figure out agriculture when we have so much work to do hunting and gathering?" or

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"Why should we spend so much time messing around in boats when we have so many issues here on the land?"

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And the answer to all three of these questions is the same:

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Reaching for new heights often creates new solutions and opportunities for people back on the ground, and I have some personal experience with this concept

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As most of you guys know by now,

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I spent seven of my nine years here at NASA working on the

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Curiosity rover in fact some of my hardware is still working like a champ on the top deck of the rover

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I'll be it a little dirtier since I touched it last but for my last two years here

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I worked on a much lesser known project called SMAP and in some ways

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I'm more proud of what it represents because SMAP is a super complex Earth orbiting satellite. Here's how it works.

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Once it's in orbit the antenna boom is deployed and in this 20 foot gold mesh reflector

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Origamis out like one of those Hoberman's sphere toys, and then the whole thing starts freaking spinning at 15 rpm

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And it's using a Radiometer that can see through the clouds to measure the soil moisture levels on earth

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This is important because soil moisture is one of the key vital signs of the planet.

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By measuring the moisture levels in the soil, it allows you to predict droughts,

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monitor floods and even predict crop yields for a given year and because the antenna spins around like that,

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you're able to measure all the soil on Earth every two to three days.

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So I left before it actually launched in 2015,

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so the reason I am here today is to follow up with some SMAP research scientists to see how things turned out

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I've been to many countries in Africa. People know about SMAP and the national government of those countries are trying to use it especially

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for drought especially for crop monitoring. So NASA has a data access policy of you know making it free for everybody

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There are three major cereal crop on the earth

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wheat, rice and corn. If you can forecast these three major crops

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So you know 70-80 percent of you know forecast you can do the crop field of the whole world. What Narenda is saying here is

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Remarkable to me, and it sums up my first point perfectly SMAP costs to 900 million dollars

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Africa is the continent with the most extreme poverty today. I did the math and for 900 million dollars

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You could feed all of Africa for less than a day

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But instead we invested in research and technology which empowers them to better help themselves

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Increasing the amount of food they can make on their own

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For decades as opposed to a one-time fleeting handout. Of the 37 missions currently running at JPL

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I think it's so cool that about half are studying and helping earth, just like SMAP

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This is a fancy way of saying

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We should be doing everything within our power to make sure that nothing catastrophically bad happens to us

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Hollywood got this right when they said that a large asteroid impact would be really bad news. Now the chances of this happening are small

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But the potential consequences are so large just ask these guys

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It makes sense to take it seriously. NASA has already put an asteroid early warning detection system in place and in October

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2022 for the first time ever they will test ramming a

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Spacecraft into an asteroid to see if you can deflect it off course with a mission called DART

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But perhaps an even bigger threat to humans are humans

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one of the goals of all of the Rovers that we sent to Mars is to gather data on what

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It would take for humans to live there

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Establishing a permanent human outpost on Mars would serve sort of like a backup hard drive for your computer in case something catastrophically bad

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happened here on earth

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America's first satellite was built here at JPL and now satellites make it so we can get GPS

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driving directions on our phone or get TV beamed down to us from space or predict the path of hurricanes with much greater accuracy

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Theword pixel in the concept of the first digital camera was also invented at JPL in the

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1960s when an engineer was trying to solve how to get pictures of the planets and send them back to earth

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In fact there are nearly

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2,000 NASA technology spin-offs

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We don't know what we don't know and so expecting NASA to justify its funding

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But predicting all the amazing things it will discover would be like

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Expecting Christopher Columbus when he was lobbying Queen Isabella for ships to predict the polio vaccine or Netflix

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Of the 18 billion that NASA gets it's not like they're just putting that money on a rocket and launching it into space

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The Majority of that money goes towards the salaries of

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Tens of thousands of some of America's most skilled workers and one of the counter arguments here is yeah

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But why do we need the government to fund these programs?

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Why not let private companies do the innovating? Private space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin are awesome

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And they play an important role

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But they're incentivized to pursue technologies that will give them a return on investment like space tourism or asteroid mining or launching satellites for other

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organizations

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there's just no incentive for a private company to invest in tracking and

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Deflecting asteroids or investing in earth science missions like SMAP and then making the data

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Available for free to anyone who needs it. So to recap for that less than half a penny from a dollar

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Investment in NASA, not only do we improve life on Earth through projects like SMAP and protect ourselves against really catastrophic

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Events and discover other incredible technologies to improve our lives along the way

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But the money to make all that happen

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goes back into growing the economy through the salaries of all the smart people doing their work. And my fifth and final reason why we

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Should spend money on NASA even when we still have unsolved problems here on earth is perhaps the most important even if less concrete

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Think it's captured best by what some call the most important picture ever taken

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What you see here is the result of a 10-day exposure image from the Hubble Deep Space

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Telescope with the exception of these three dots which are single stars

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Every speck, smudge, and spiral you see in this image is a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars

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Just like our own Milky Way galaxy

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Most remarkably the field of view captured here is the darkest part of the night sky the size of Roosevelt's eye on a dime

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Held at arm's length we send men to the moon and orbiters to Saturn and Rovers to Mars

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Not necessarily because there's some financial incentive or some quick payoff

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We're looking to exploit, but because as humans there are fundamental burning questions we're eager to answer

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The first person to set foot on Mars is alive right now. They could be in junior high or high school

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He or she could be watching this video right now

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It could be you I feel that our continued exploration of space in all its forms

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fills me with hope and inspires me to reach higher and makes me a better person

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I want to thank Bill and Melinda Gates for teaming up with me on this video if you want to know why they think there's still a

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Case for being an optimist in today's world even with all the negative headlines you should check out the Bill and Melinda Gates

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Annual letter at gatesletter.com this optimism stems from facts like the number of children who die every year has been cut in half

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so has extreme poverty declining by half in less than twenty years and more children are attending school now than ever before but we're

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Optimistic not just because we know life used to be worse

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It's seeing the positive trend line of all the ongoing work by brilliant folks like at NASA and elsewhere

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Who are working to improve life on Earth by solving some of the world's toughest challenges

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I will leave a link to the letter in the video description