Criticism of space exploration

Opponents point to the substantial financial costs, suggesting that funds allocated for space exploration could be better spent addressing urgent issues on Earth, such as poverty, healthcare, education, and environmental degradation.

Critics express concerns about risks to human life, environmental impacts like potential contamination of celestial bodies, and the possibility of militarizing space, which could exacerbate geopolitical tensions.

In 1963, years before the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing, German-American critical theorist Hannah Arendt argued:[1] The conquest of space and the science that made it possible have come perilously close to this point.

"[4] Amitai Etzioni wrote in 2018 that space colonization "brings with it an unavoidable subtext of despair", distracting from efforts to halt anthropogenic climate change, arguing that "any serious Mars endeavor will inevitably cut into the drive to save Mother Earth".

Mark R. Royce, writing for Providence magazine, argued in 2020 that rather than being a non-partisan, inoffensive, and humanistic endeavor, space exploration is "largely irrational, originating at the intersection of the early Cold War arms race, the mass hysteria of the Red Scare, and the utopian worship of technical progress that characterized the mid-twentieth century.