My earliest dreams were to be a part of the space program. My 5th grade science fair project was on the Space Shuttle. I was in 7th grade when the Challenger exploded and that did nothing to dampen my fascination with traveling to the stars.
This weekend, I was hitting up the grocery store and on the way I caught sight of three homeless people panhandling for change. In the store, someone in front of me swiped a card to pay for groceries with food stamps, the kind of moment that makes you realize your cart is full of luxuries that taste suspiciously like Oreos and shame. Prices on the shelves aren’t just climbing; they’re doing somersaults, and every can of beans seems to come with a small, expensive lecture about supply chains, tariffs, and the weather in the Midwest. All against the backdrop of the Artemis II launch of astronauts around the moon this week.
This might be a time to question the luxury of a space program. I know the space program has given us hundreds of advancements—memory foam that makes naps possible in trains, ballpoint pens that write upside down, and that stubborn urge to look at a map of the solar system and pretend we remember where everything is. It’s easy to fall in love with the stars when your apartment has drafty windows and your neighbor’s cat has claimed the radiator as its personal starship. This is also a time where privatization of space travel has never been bigger.
And here we are, faced with a ladder whose rungs are labeled homelessness, hunger, and health, while the other ladder, labeled space, stretches up into the night with a telescope aimed at the heavens. The rhetoric lobs softly: “We’ll pursue science to better human life,” as if the two aren’t holding hands, one foot in the lab and one on a curb where a family worries about paying for the next week’s groceries. It’s a matchbox city out there, and we’re asked to applaud the firework show while the fuse burns at both ends.
The truth is, the space program has done some astonishing things—things that remind us we’re capable of more than we’ve allowed ourselves to dream. But the same ingenuity that makes a rover roll across Martian dust could be applied to more practical, near-term needs: medical technologies repurposed for rural clinics, satellite data used to direct resources where a winter homeless shelter is needed most, 3D printing to repair housing stock, or a robust approach to mental health that doesn’t require a coat of stardust to feel possible. Cold cash to help build affordable housing.
I’m not asking to shelve the stars or pretend NASA doesn’t matter. I will ride for NASA forever, but the priorities just seem out of whack right now. We’ve spent billions to send a handful of people around the moon while these three folks on street corners are asking for $5.
I’m asking for a smarter balance, a budget that treats the bottom line and the moral line with equal gravity. We can fund rocket science and front-line health care; we can invest in the stars while investing in the people who feed, clothe, and heal their neighbors today. Let’s give our cosmic dreams a seat at the table, but let the table be big enough for bread, medicine, and a decent night’s sleep for every person waiting in line at the grocery store. Moreso, some of the sharpest minds in the world send people to space – might they come up with other solutions to the world’s problems?
After all, if we can engineer a launch of a tin can to a crater-filled rock, we can engineer a way to keep a family from losing their home, a child from going hungry, and a life from slipping into the quiet gravity of despair. The stars will still be there when we’re ready to look up again.
(Get more from Chris Kamler on Twitter, some call it X, where he is @chriskamler)
