DEBATE.ORG CLASSIC: SEMI FINALS: Logical-Master vs Darth Grievous

Thank you for the debate Logical Master. Unfortunate our first has to take place in a competition. This is a incredibly hard subject for the Con side, but I will do my best. Fist off before I discuss LM's three contentions, I'd like to clarify what NASA stands for: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Meaning that its main purpose in existence should be the study of the sky, space, and flight. 1) All of these inventions are very well and good. No one, including myself, is arguing that they haven't been beneficial to mankind. However, after taking a close look at the lists I've seen that all of the inventions, as helpful as they are, had little to do with space travel or air flight. Yes, they are massively helpful, but have little to do with NASA's main purpose. It seems that NASA is good at doing just about everything accept their jobs. These by products of their studies are even more useful than the studies themselves! Rather than continue to fund NASA, it seems the whole department should be shut down and reorganized into something like the Better Inventions Bureau, or something, because that is just what NASA is doing now: everything but their jobs. I say that because while they are doing a good job trying, most of their attempts are failures (http://www.rense.com...) resulting most commonly in death, the most recent from the 2003 disaster over Texas. The actual space exploration they are trying to do is way to hazardous, to man kind and the environment. Not to mention that it take a few tons of fuel, an already precious resource, just to launch 'stuff' into space (http://www.polaris.iastate.edu...) only to come back with nothing but charred flesh and gossip for a few weeks, and if they were extremely lucky, a little tidbit to put into a Discovery channel special. None of which is in particularly useful for the here and now of Earths own momentous amounts of drama. It is not worth the cost because no matter how cool the idea of space travel is, it is very costly both in lives and money, and completely pointless except as intellectual conversation. Only one of 3 reasons why not to fund it. 2) First off for clarification, the dinosaurs were not downfallen by themselves, rather it was a massive cataclysm from an asteroid, something totally out of their claws. Humans more and more are seeming to be causing their own slow extinction, far before anything from space were to destroy us. Space colonization shouldn't be a last act of desperation to get away from our own mess. Our first priority should be fixing this world before we run away from it. But that would be very expensive. Where would that kind of money come from? How about the 17.6 billion dollars being dedicated to a totally pointless and faulty program? Say NASA? Rather than escape we should hit these problems head on. NASA is only causing more problems and fixing fewer, at least within the proper boundaries of what they are supposed to be researching. 3) 1% of the US budget is A LOT of money. 2.7 trillion is the estimated budget for 2009. 17 billion of that can fix a lot, despite what your article says. If it's enough to fund the building of space ships, its more than enough to put into better research for alternative fuels, or environmental conservation. As I've shown is contention 1, NASA's existence is a hazard, and must be changed into a form of research that is purposefully made to create what has only so far been by products of their research or completely shut down. Its current research is only good for 'tea party' conversation, in the past its practical experiments have been deadly, and overall its greatest achievements have been things that are outside its intended field of study. For these reasons, it is not worth the cost to fund NASA, but other projects that are far more useful and safe towards humanity. Thus the overview of my rebuttals is that NASA has strayed away from it's original purpose, and that even when they are on track they end up wasting resources and killing people. They are not worth funding, and the money, as little as it may be in proportion to the entirety of the US budget, should be put to better use elsewhere.