Why NASA Needs to Continue Current Funding for the International Space Station

摘要

In 1999 the Russian space station MIR was abandoned and will fall to Earth in the year 2000 ("MIR LEFT..." 1999). The world will then, yet again, be in need of a permanent space laboratory. World space organizations have been working for the past few years, and will continue working for the next few, on a project called the International Space Station (ISS). This $35 billion project will take a number of years to build and will take massive amounts of resources. It is the collective project of 16 different countries (Brunner 1999). The country with the most responsibility in terms of funding and labor is the United States. The space station can do things that the Space Shuttle and the geriatric MIR space station could only dream of doing. Besides all of the purely scientific benefits, it will also have many benefits to humanity itself and to world politics. But its largest funder, NASA, is in danger of budget cuts, which may hinder the quality of US-made parts, decreasing the station's longevity or making more expensive repairs necessary. This could delay the project altogether. The world cannot allow this to happen. We need ISS as soon as we can, and we need to keep it for as long as we can.