In Friday’s film, “The Martian”, Mark Watney is accidentally left on Mars, and NASA drops everything to build rockets to save him. But no one seems to mention the vast resources used to turn around a spacecraft and send it back to Mars, not to mention the failed rocket built to resupply Mark Watney. According to current NASA information, the average rocket launch today costs half a billion dollars, or in more relevant terms, about a third of the current student debt in the US. So, was it really worth it for NASA to spend so much money, presumably outside their existing budget (see the scene where the NASA director mentions requesting money from Congress) for the sake of one life? Leaving Mark Watney on Mars to die may seem incredibly inhumane, but he went on the mission knowing death was a high risk. The money NASA used to build a failed rocket could have been used to supplement Medicare or Medicaid. So what do you think, should the money have been spent to save lives domestically, or to save a pioneer in space research?
Rose Scholars Fall 2017
Endless possibilities
In all honesty, I don’t think real life NASA would spend so much money on just one person. But that doesn’t make for a good story; after all, we generally like our stories to have, after all the conflict and hurdles that our protagonists must barrel through in order to, we hope, make it to the good ending and the happily ever after. And The Martian, even though it looks a lot like a space documentary that might be playing in a museum somewhere, is just a story, thought up by an author six years ago.
So, to really answer your ending question, no, I don’t think, if The Martian scenario were to happen today, that NASA should invest that much time and energy into attempting to save one person. Whether all the money put into space travel should go into domestic funds here is debatable; there’s much that space can teach us, as The Martian shows us. But it would definitely not be worth it.