Don't overlook space spending as real stimulus

Forty years after the first moon landing, space is far from a national priority. Trillion-dollar deficits, multi-billion-dollar bailouts and radical reform of the healthcare industry have made space exploration seem like a foolish extravagance.

An example is the International Space Station, derided as being built simply for some place for the space shuttle to go.

With the shuttle due to be retired at the end of next year, Americans will depend on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for a ride to the ISS, and there are no plans to operate the space station beyond 2015.

"In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft," NASA space station program maanger Michael T. Suffrendini said last month.

That's a $100 billion investment that NASA plans to turn into a brief but spectacular light show. Perhaps they could time it to coincide with the Fourth of July.

We doubt NASA actually carrys through with the de-orbit plans in 2016, but with all the expensive "investments" on the table in Washington, nothing is out of the question.

One official even suggested giving the space station to China, like an astral white elephant.

It's an old argument, but consider some of the products that have resulted from the space program.

No, Tang, Teflon and Velcro really aren't among them; they, along with magnetic resonance imaging, were around before the advent of the space program, as a Computerworld story pointed out.

Some of the other products and technologies that actually do owe their existence to NASA's space program:

* Wireless headsets, like the Pacific Plantronics headset Neil Armstrong used on the moon.

* Memory foam, developed for airplane seats.

* Cordless tools, like the battery powered lunar drill.

* Flame-resistant clothing, developed after the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.

* Cooling suits.

* A fluid reycling system created by NASA, now used in kidney dialysis.

* Exercise equipment developed for the shuttle is now used by sports tams and medical rehabilitation centers.

* Freeze-dried food developed for long space missions, preserves food's nutritional value and taste while reducing weight and increasing shelf life.

* Scratch-resistant plastic developed for aerospace equipment, which found its way into eyeglass lenses.

The article didn't mention dozens of other space-related technologies and products, such as GPS systems that help drivers find an address and make farming more efficient, and miniaturization that has given pocket calculators and digital watches computing power orders of magnitude beyone the computers that took Apollo 11 to the moon.

NASA's current work in developing a new space transportation system for a trip back to the moon and eventually to Mars promises to push technology just as far or farther than the original moon program.

If we're looking for real, long-term economic stimulus, space shouldn't be overlooked.