How space exploration can improve life on Earth | Leigh Phillips

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : But for all its purported sobriety in the face of Musk fanboys and Jetsonian techno-utopianism, anti-space ideology amounts to a critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.
56% : But the European Space Agency's 2024 budget is a record €7.8bn (the largest proportion of which, €2.4bn, is allocated for Earth observation), a pittance compared with the €240bn that EU states spent in 2022 on defense.
55% : This means we need leftwing space policy, not leftwing anti-space ideology.
51% : Urban development planning, tracking the consequences of government policies, distributions of wealth, and dozens of other more directly socio-economic phenomena have strong spatial dimensions that make space-based remote sensing indispensable.
48% : Nasa's budget this year was $25bn, while the US Department of Defense in 2024 has more than $2tn in budgetary resources, or about 15% of the federal budget.
42% : These space-critical partisans view the endeavour as a dangerous fantasy that distracts from the need to fix this world while delivering yet another source of carbon pollution and "extractivism".

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