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May 29th, 2008
09:30 PM ET
The Price of Space
One [very unscientific] reason to send a robotic rover to Mars: It's cool. We're able to get a sense of what it's like on another planet - a place it takes a rocket 296 days to reach! NASA hopes the Phoenix Lander will help scientists figure out if life is possible on the Red Planet. But here's the hitch: Phoenix cost $557 million. And I don't mean the mission; I mean the robot alone.
We've learned a lot about our solar system by sending spacecraft into it, but space exploration has never come cheap. How valuable is it to you?
Carl Azuz, Anchor
Well, not very much to me, but lot to the scientists. From this, the scientists could learn about Mars' soil, shape and that life forms could really live in it.
I think it is a rewarding investment. Human's knowledge always comes from unknown things. Brand-new knowledge leads to big revolution. Besides, resources on the earth are limited, and people don't preserve them well. Perhaps, part of us finally have to immigrate to another planet . So I think space exploration is necessary.
Wow! That's a LOT of money!!! Is it worth it? I'm not really sure. I think we better stick with our polluted Earth. $o$
I think it’ll be worth it if the robot had found something. If it hadn’t found anything, all that money is wasted.
Thats just how much the robot costs, what you didn't factor in is how much interest will we pay to the Bank of China for the money we borrowed to pay for it.
I don't want them to stop exploring space, but I think our Government should learn to manage money more efficently. Then one expensive thing will not use up all of the budget and take money away from other, more equally important things. 🙂
i think it is really helpful to us cause if we find other living things then we find out we aren't the only living thing in out milkyway
i think our contry needs to spend money on more importat stuff like the war not a space mission but it would be cool to see if there is life on another planet
I think it's really huge amount of money.
If there's an achievement in the mission, it can be worth.
But we must measure the worth between the cost and the result.
it's definitely worth it to me. I want to learn all I can so that we could travel to other planets and expand there. This mission is one of many that will lead up to another giant leap for mankind.
Sara's right, we sould learn to manage money better. I love that we're able to send rovers to Mars, and have out Space Station, but I don't love how cost gets in the way of it all.
Right now, we sould focus on fixing the budget, then we can look for aliens.
That is a good thing,but we need to think about whats going on right here on earth. I think we should privatize space travel and research and all its development, there are plenty of companys and or businesses that can afford that write off on there tax.
And put all the money we will save to reducing are national deit.
The cataclysm to come from outer space, will only be diminished by how our civilization takes steps in securing our existence, through outer space exploration. If and when the danger arises, we would already have had in place a defense system, to counter measure the threat. I think the dynosaurs tought us a lesson !!