MANNED SPACE MISSIONS!Is it really worth it?By: Hazel Eklund

Yes! Manned space missions are definitely needed.

This is needed for the future. Some may say that it’s too expensive, but actually it is a lot cheaper now. The longer you wait the more expensive it would get.

It’s just not worth it.

The Obama Administration is funding NASA by giving them $6 billion dollars. The incredible thing is that it’s not even going toward manned space missions. This is a huge waste of money and is just going to waste.

NASA is benefitting more then just the astronauts.

NASA employs a ton of people. For instance, in San Francisco NASA created nearly 5300 jobs just in that area. NASA is benefitting everyone.

There are a lot cheaper ways we can explore space other than manned space missions.

We could easily send robots like Spirit and Opportunity to areas all around space. Not to mention instead of the $19 billion dollar budget they set, it would be a fraction of that cost.

My Opinion.

Personally, I think that manned space missions are productive. Although they cost a lot of money nothing compares to when you have actual people telling you the experiences they’ve had rather than a robot. Once we send our first mission out we would be able to see what materials we could cut back on or anything that could be cheaper, and that would ultimately reduce the cost, and overtime we could maybe even recycle the same rocket each time we went out into space. To move forward, we have to take the first step, and even though that’ll be expensive, in the end I think that it will be worth it.