Something positive, at last.

It's been long-awaited, long-delayed, and undoubtedly will no longer live up to the hype I've mustered for it, but, nonetheless, I type.

Almost two weeks ago, NASA announced the beginning of a new plan to return us to the moon by 2018, laying the groundwork for a manned mission to Mars. (The press release is here, and more information will be available for a little while here.) The proposal has been greeted with a great deal of skepticism and derision, particularly in the face of the nightmarish damage done by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Why are we thinking about spending more money on space, it is asked, when so many things demand our attention here on earth? Why are we talking about risking more lives in space after the Columbia has been destroyed and our shuttle fleet has proven too unreliable to continue flying? The New York Times even published an editorial entitled "The Dark Side of the Moon," listing reason after reason why this is a bad, even ridiculous, idea. (I'd link to it, but the editorial is now part of the pay-only portion of their site. Assholes!) In it, Robert L. Park decried the costs and said that human space exploration is over; robots can find the information we are searching for and, after Mars, "there is no place humans can go in a foreseeable future." All this proposed expense, he says, is just a political hot potato, put out by the Bush administration so that the next guy can be the one saddled with the blame of ending human space exploration.

Why, then, should we spend money for human beings to ride fire to the stars?

I have been pondering the answers for days. The costs of rebuilding after Katrina and the knowledge of the Columbia's dead are powerful arguments against it; they weigh heavily against the gleeful joy of exploration that spaceflight brings to mind. If pushed hard enough, the fear they engender can crush that joy-but fear is rarely a source of wisdom.

Republican government is an ideal. It is supposed to be the rule of the peoples' representatives, chosen for their adherence to the peoples' dreams while having the wisdom to avoid their baser instincts. It falls short much of the time, so much so that the ideal has been forgotten in many minds, and only the failings are left to define government for them. Frustration and anger at government then lead to the belief that the very concept of government is itself an evil, and lo, you have a modern conservative. I do not, of course, share this belief, but anger is certainly the primary emotion I feel when I look at government actions today. Anger at the arrogance, frustration at the stupidity; conservatives and liberals alike feel it, and we are all dragged down by it sometimes.

Spaceflight is hope. That simple truth is the greatest argument for it. It is one of the greatest expressions of the ideal of government that can be imagined: together, we have strived, and struggled, and fallen, and risen once more, and finally made real a dream as old as humanity itself-to reach out our hand and touch the heavens. Who can look at the images of Earth taken from space, of Neil Armstrong walking across the surface of the moon, of the images of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, and say that they feel no stirrings in their soul? Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, a Saudi astronaut, said of his flight, "The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." Who can read these words and say we should not have gone?

A few, of course, and they do, but they make up a tiny minority even of those who say that we should not return to space. Even those who no longer want to risk lives for exploration find it difficult to denigrate the achievements that have already been made. Almost no amount of worry or fear is enough to dampen the inspiration and pride that that memories of that July day in 1969 raises up in our hearts.

Dreams and pride alone are not enough to justify a return to the moon, however, or a journey on to Mars and beyond. An understanding of the risks, the costs, and the potential gains are necessary, or else an inspiring pursuit can quickly become folly.

The costs in terms of resources are really quite basic. Contrary to many critics' claims, NASA is not talking about spending a single extra penny on their new initiative; instead, they are talking about reallocating their budget towards this end. The primary reason for this, I would imagine, is to defeat opponents' arguments of frivolous spending and to try to move forward in an atmosphere where almost all government spending is subject being called frivolous. This is, of course, wrong. Not nearly enough money is spent on space.

NASA's current budget is $16.2 billion a year, out of a budget of over $2.4 trillion-less than a hundredth of our tax dollars. When Kennedy gave his famous "we will go to the moon" speech at Rice University in 1962, he justified the expenditure with an apt comparison: NASA's $5.4 billion per year budget was "somewhat less" than was spent that year on cigarettes and cigars. Today, we spend $16.2 billion on space and over $25 billion on poison. Perhaps the two should keep pace.

The risk, then, is little, but what of the gains? Science is not a pleasant topic for those who demand concrete, expectable, definable gains, because it is one of the greatest demonstrations of the universe's irritating refusal to be what we want it to be. It is not simple, safe, or obedient. It is dangerous, uncertain, and confusing. It is, nonetheless, wondrous and, in small pieces and at odd times, understandable. Scientists cannot tell us what we will find out there. We may find more information about our planet's beginnings. We may find life so different from ours that it staggers the imagination. We may find nothing but dust and ice. We may find that aliens have latched on to the Voyager probes and have been feeding them false data for years and that Neptune is actually a giant frozen serving of Chicken Saltimbocca that was put there as a defense against Galactus. The danger, the worry, and the beauty of it all is that we simply don't know.

We can, however, point to past benefits that have come from space exploration. Technologies developed for, and in, space, are used every day: scientific instrument calibrators made in orbit without the hassles of gravity and air pressure, radiation shielding, MRI technology, self-inflating rafts, firemens' lightweight air tanks, advanced semiconductors. Athletic shoes use padding from moon boots. NASA aerodynamic models are used to make better golf balls, for fuck's sake! And, to boot, we've gotten a better idea of the age of the solar system and how often we're going to have to deal with the danger of life-ending-sized asteroids. We have lost lives in the pursuit of space, to be sure; the Apollo 1 disaster, Challenger, Columbia, and others have cost us eighteen lives. How many have been saved because of their sacrifice? How many people have survived cancer, strokes, fires, shipwrecks, car accidents, that wouldn't have? We can never know an exact number, but it is enough.

Future space exploration may yield more advances and more wonders, or it may not-but the risks are worth it. NASA's astronauts are willing. Are we?

Frontiers still beckon, and the hearts of the greatest of us still yearn to find out what is there. Contrary to the pessimism of the the Times editorial I pointed to earlier, there are many places to explore within our reach. Callisto orbits Jupiter, and has a 10-kilometer-deep salt-water sea 200 kilometers beneath its crater-ridden surface. The craters may tell us of what has passed through our system; the sea may hold single-celled life, or more complex life, or none at all-but almost any liquid water has potential enough for us to look. Io is another of Jupiter's satellites, the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Our own volcanoes churn up all manner of geological wonders-and fertilize soil that quickly teems with life. Titan, orbiting Saturn, is the only moon in the solar system with a real atmosphere, primarily nitrogen (95%; Earth's is 78%). Volcanoes explode with water and methane and ammonia instead of lava. Neptune's moon Triton also exhibits this cryovolcanism in plumes up t0 8 kilometers high, and geological data points to significant internal heating. The water and the heat together may have made an underground liquid sea possible, creating an even likelier birthplace for life than on Callisto. And Jupiter's Europa, perhaps the most enticing of all of the outer moons, has another liquid sea beneath its surface, kept warm by Jupiter's gravity causing tidal friction. It also has an atmosphere, a very thin one only worthy of the name in the scientific sense-but it is a thin layer of oxygen. Astronauts might well explore Europa and build a base there using some of Europa's own natural resources.

These examples are the product of just a few minutes of research on my part, and I can't even be called a space enthusiast, merely a supporter. The experts will be better able to tell us where it is most likely to find life and where it will be easiest to begin building colonies, but there are places to go. The unknown beckons to us. Life may be there waiting for us, and if it is not, knowledge will be, and we will all be the better for it.