By Aidan Killian
“We are going to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” These unforgettable words, spoken by former President John F. Kennedy, have forever been ingrained in the American consciousness, guiding our country to boldly go where no man has gone before and plant the stars and stripes on a place the founding fathers never expected it to fly over: our lunar sister, the moon.

But now we’ve been to the moon, not once, not twice, but on six separate occasions, costing our country 28 billion taxpayer dollars (or 280 billion when adjusted for inflation). What have we achieved from these missions? Very little, says former President Jimmy Carter’s advisor, Amitai Etzioni. “The most significant finding gained from the Apollo missions was the discovery that the Moon’s crust is thicker on one side than on the other.”

The Apollo missions were a monetary and logistical disaster, which thrived purely on the animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union and cost the lives of three astronauts who died before the atmosphere was even broken.

And now, the Trump administration has promised we will return to the moon, a promise of which Biden has decided to honor. NASA predicts that “Artemis 3” will be the first ship to land on the moon since 1972 by 2026. A project of which is expected to cost taxpayers $93 billion.

So, a question must be asked: why? Why spend 0.3% of our national expenditure on a service of which very few Americans want (or even realize exists), and even fewer will benefit from?

The Artemis program claims its objective is to have a sustainable lunar colony by the end of the decade, but this mission is, at best, prodigal, and at worst, deadly. Humanity has spent the past billion years evolving on Earth, and founding a colony away from our planet, at our current technological status, is a doomed endeavor.

Take the case of Biosphere two, which in 1991 was established as an experiment for human survival in space. The biosphere was completely enclosed from the outside world for three years with a variety of Earth biomes, creatures, and plants for the biosphere’s eight residents to use to sustain themselves and react to possible crises that one may encounter in space.

How did the experiment end? In disaster. The biosphere’s occupants faced infighting, high levels of depression and anxiety, and a mass extinction event among the vegetation and animal life that was enclosed with the biosphere. The experiment culminated in the gradual loss of oxygen from the biosphere, but luckily just before the group succumbed to asphyxia, a scientist observing the experiment cracked a window and saved the residents of the biosphere.

If this experiment were to happen in space or on the moon, there would be no knight in shining armor to crack a window and save the day. The astronauts would presumably be entirely reliant on Earth for resources and aid. The infighting, the anxiety, the deaths of food sources, the loss of oxygen would all be plausible dangers the astronauts would have to contend with.

And that’s not even to mention the physical toll of space travel, including extreme weight loss, bone loss, high levels of radiation, permanent damage to eyesight, increased risk of cancer, DNA damage, inhibited immune system, weakened heart, stiffened blood vessels, leading excessive amounts of fluid to enter the head, among other dangers.

I must emphasize that I am not against space travel of any kind. I simply reasonably believe it should not be the role of a governmental organization to regulate it. NASA is untrustworthy, corrupt, and held down by the bindings of politics that private space enterprises do not possess.

Take the case of the 1986 Challenger disaster. The launch of the shuttle was originally scheduled for over a week after it was actually launched. NASA, however, was pressured by the Reagan administration to launch before they were ready in order for the date to align with Reagan’s State of the Union address. The procedure was rushed, and the Challenger never even made it past the atmosphere before it exploded, taking the lives of her seven crew members with it.

These are the kind of political setbacks that private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin don’t have to contend with.

NASA, like all governmental organizations, has to deal with another little problem that private companies don’t: corruption. In the mid-90s, the FBI performed a sting operation on NASA and found that dozens of contractors paid bribes to NASA in return for selecting which experiments would be performed on the International Space Station.

NASA has also been accused of accepting bribes from companies to only use materials from said company. This has often led to faulty products, such as in the failed Taurus XL launches.

Dissenters of my argument may point out all of the amazing technology the public has got from NASA’s experiments. Everything from water filters to scratch-resistant lenses, from cordless tools to the smoke detector to satellite television itself, can trace its origins back to NASA.

I will not try to dispute the usefulness and importance of these technologies, but it must be recognized that private organizations will show much greater success in bringing these products to the market than NASA ever did. The smoke detector wasn’t open to the consumer market until three years after its invention by NASA. For cordless tools, it was four. It took almost a decade for the public to be able to purchase satellite television since its inception.

It would, however, be incumbent upon private space organizations to allow their inventions to enter the market in order to make a profit. This will lead to greater technological advancement and a way of life for all American citizens. Despite private space organizations only being in their infancy, already innovations in plant-based foods and oncology have been made by Blue Origin, a private space company, that has reached the market in less than a calendar year.

Private spaceflight already seems to be the future of extraterrestrial travel. Private spaceflight companies have decreased costs of launches, allowed more qualified professionals to find work in the space industry, and opened the door for tourism in space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already promised to land on Mars by the end of the decade, setting a new precedent for what humanity can achieve.

The stars belong to the people, not the government, and it should be for us all to explore. Opening the door for competition in the space industry will ensure technological and exploratory progress is made at a faster rate than if the government who and what receives the products of space travel.

Whether it takes ten years or a thousand, the stars will await us, and we can dream of a future where the private companies of our world can spread the human messages of peace, liberty, and capitalism throughout our galaxy and beyond.