FOOTLOOSE AND…
If Congress ever gets back to doing some work, one of the financial requests to be acted upon is that by NASA for $ 17.5 billion for the New Horizons mission, which is sending a spacecraft to Pluto. You know about Pluto, right? It’s that downgraded planet sometimes called “the icy, little dwarf” of the space world.
If you recoil over the price tag, remember that NASA’s Saturn mission cost $46 billion! Then, too, the Apollo mission gobbled up $28 billion, while the Lunar Module Endeavor racked up $11 billion. And don’t forget that NASA has other missions that require funding. Our last count numbered these at 164! A recent check of New Horizons shows that it has logged 4.5 billion miles on its journey launched in 2006. Scientists continue to marvel at this distance and the fact that it appears unscathed by space objects.
From 1958 to 2011, the average yearly expenditures by NASA for its huge mission programs has averaged about $9.98 billion. New Horizons, incidentally, is expected to arrive at Pluto in July 2015. Perhaps, by then, Congress will have acted on the NASA request for operating dollars in some orderly fashion. After all, the scientific community is working on making our world a better place, and NASA’s endeavors are surely a major, if costly, contributor to that goal.
