Space Exploration

Introduction

The question of whether space exploration is a necessity or an indulgence assumes that these categories are mutually exclusive. They are not. Rather, the question becomes: under what theory of distributive justice can governments spend $93 billion on a lunar programme while 700 million people currently exist on less than $2.15 a day? The answer, I will argue, is none. Space exploration is not intrinsically wrong and some of it is genuinely necessary. But the scale, structure, and priorities of contemporary state-funded space programmes, alongside the commercial industry they have spawned, cannot be justified under any serious moral humanitarian framework. The question is not whether we should look up. It is whether the way we do so is defensible when people are dying of preventable causes below.

Proponents’ View

Proponents of space exploration advance two serious arguments for its necessity. The first is scientific and defensive: monitoring near-Earth objects is a legitimate planetary safety function. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, which injured over 1,600 people despite arriving without warning,1 demonstrates that asteroid surveillance is not a speculative concern but a very real problem. The second argument is technological: space research generates innovations — the CT scan, for instance, traces its digital image processing origins to NASA's Apollo-era research2 — that produce social benefits impossible to predict in advance. Both arguments do have genuine weight, and any honest treatment of this question must acknowledge them.

Who Bears the Opportunity Cost?

However, accepting these arguments does not entail accepting the conclusion that current space spending is justified. It shows something much more modest: that some space activity, specifically asteroid surveillance and basic research functions, clears the bar of necessity in order to protect the human race. The task is to ask whether everything beyond that threshold is also necessary, or whether, at some point, we cross into indulgence. The most useful framework here is not the cold, empirical authority of utilitarian cost-benefit accounting, but Rawlsian justice. John Rawls's difference principle states that inequalities in the distribution of social goods are just only if they benefit the most disadvantaged members of a society. When applied to public expenditure, this means that a state investment is not automatically justified by aggregate welfare gains. Instead, it must also be evaluated against what the same resources could do for those who are at the very bottom of the hierarchy. This is the standard that contemporary space programmes fail to meet.

What Space Spending Actually Costs

NASA's 2023 budget was $25.4 billion,3 and the Artemis lunar programme alone is projected to cost $93 billion through fiscal year 20254 . Compare this to the UN World Food Programme’s estimation in 2021 that ending world hunger would require approximately $40 billion per year5 , the World Bank’s records stating that there are approximately 700 million people living in extreme poverty, 6 and that around 3.5 million people die annually from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. The causes aforementioned are, in the main, preventable with basic infrastructure investment.7 These are not rhetorical statistics but the empirical content of the opportunity cost.

The standard rebuttal that space and anti-poverty budgets are entirely separate tracks, so the comparison is a false dilemma, is immensely misleading. While it is true that cancelling Artemis would not automatically redirect funds to global health, this objection completely misses the relevant question. The Rawlsian dilemma is not about accounting lines but about political will and moral priority. Governments that choose to commit $93 billion to landing astronauts on the moon while hundreds of millions lack clean water are making a visible judgement that the scientific prestige of lunar exploration outweighs the preventable suffering of the global poor. It is that judgement that requires justification which has not been convincingly offered yet.

The Space Tourism Problem

The rise of commercial space tourism exponentially compounds the moral problem. The spaceflight company Virgin Galactic charges $450,000 per seat8 and the first Blue Origin seat was auctioned for $28 million.9 More widely known on social media, the musician Katy Perry flew to space for just eleven minutes. These are even more damning as they are not scientific missions; they are luxury products for the ultra-wealthy, subsidised indirectly by the regulatory infrastructure, launch facilities, and aerospace development that public money has painstakingly built over decades. The proponent might argue that private enterprise should be free to sell what the market will bear. However, commercial space tourism is only possible because of decades of state-funded research. The public underwrote the technology and now the benefits of that technology are being sold to billionaires at prices that exclude virtually every human being on Earth.

At the current state of our world when income inequality has reached historically extreme levels, this is not a neutral market outcome. It is a redistribution of publicly funded knowledge, regulatory access, and the narrative of human progress toward those who already have the most. That is not a necessity. It is, by any reasonable definition, an indulgence.

The Civilisational Insurance Argument and Why It Fails

The strongest rebuttal to this argument is to look at it from the perspective of time. Space exploration advocates argue that the sun will eventually cause Earth to become uninhabitable, and humanity's long-term survival depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. Through this view, investing in space is not indulgence but becomes civilisational insurance, and the opportunity cost calculation changes entirely when the alternative is eventual extinction.

This argument fails on two grounds. First, the timescale involved – billions of years – renders it largely irrelevant to any plausible theory of intergenerational obligation. We do not ordinarily think that remote existential possibilities justify present inaction on acute humanitarian crises. We would not, for instance, accept the argument that funding meteor deflection for threats centuries away justifies cutting malaria treatment today. The logic is structurally the same. Secondly, and more urgent by a far larger margin, the argument implicitly concedes the climate objection: if Earth becomes uninhabitable, it will almost certainly be because of climate change due to humans on a timescale of decades, not astronomical processes through billions of years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that there is a greater than 50% probability of crossing the 1.5°C warming threshold as early as the 2030s,10 triggering cascading effects including sea-level rise, ecosystem collapse, and severe disruption to global food systems.

Redirecting scientific capital and public funding toward space colonisation in this context is not civilisational planning. Rather, it is a needless rationalisation for continuing to damage the only planet we currently have.

Drawing the Line

None of this requires the conclusion that all space exploration should cease. What we see evidently is that asteroid surveillance, climate-monitoring satellites, and basic scientific research into the solar system plausibly satisfy the necessity condition: they serve planetary welfare, produce broad public goods, and cannot easily be replaced by alternative investments. These functions clear the Rawlsian bar because they at minimum do not actively harm the least advantaged.

What fails the bar is the rest: the prestige programmes, the lunar bases, the Mars colonies, and above all the commercial tourism industry that packages publicly-funded technology as a luxury experience for the global elite. These are indulgences not in the pejorative sense of being frivolous, but in the precise moral sense of being expenditures whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to the already-advantaged while the opportunity cost falls on those least able to bear it.

Conclusion

The question is not whether space exploration is intrinsically valuable. It is. The question is whether its current scale, structure and commercial trajectory can be justified when measured against the acute needs of the 700 million people in extreme poverty, 6 the 3.5 million dying annually from inadequate water, 7 and the climate emergency that threatens to destabilise the foundations of organised human life. Judged by any serious theory of distributive justice, the answer is that a significant portion of what we spend on space is not a necessity. It is an indulgence — and an unusually expensive one, measured in human lives.

Endnotes

1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2018, February 15). Five years after the Chelyabinsk meteor: NASA leads efforts in planetary defense. https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/five-years-after-the-chelyabinsk-meteor-nasa-leads-efforts-in-planetary-defense/

2. NASA Spinoff. (1998). The inside view. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1998/er4.htm

3. Dreier, C., & Doris, E. (2023, January 3). NASA's FY 2023 budget. The Planetary Society. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasas-fy-2023-budget

4. NASA Office of Inspector General. (2021, November 15). NASA's management of the Artemis missions (Report No. IG-22-003). As reported in: Foust, J. (2021, November 15). NASA will spend $93 billion on Artemis moon program by 2025. Space.com. https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-moon-program-93-billion-2025

5. World Food Programme. (2021). We have the resources to end hunger — no child should be allowed to starve. https://www.wfp.org/stories/we-have-resources-end-hunger-no-child-should-be-allowed-starve

6. World Bank. (2024, October 15). Ending poverty for half the world could take more than a century. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/10/15/ending-poverty-for-half-the-world-could-take-more-than-a-century

7. United Nations. (n.d.). World Water Day reminds us of the value of a precious resource. https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/world-water-day-reminds-us-value-precious-resource

8. Reuters. (2021, August 5). Virgin Galactic jumps after unveiling new $450,000 ticket price. Gulf News. https://gulfnews.com/business/aviation/virgin-galactic-jumps-after-unveiling-new-450000-ticket-price-1.1628273872779

9. The Planetary Society. (2021, July 14). Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic: Their space tourism flights explained. https://www.planetary.org/articles/blue-origin-virgin-galactic-space-tourism-flights-explained

10. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2021). Climate change 2021: The physical science basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report. Cambridge University Press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/