Earth Today, Space Tomorrow

Story By Dionel Grice. Photo of Dionel Grice by Dwayne Smith.

When you hear the word, “space”, what do you think? Space, it’s a beautiful place. We as humans have been studying space since man could remember. Fifty million years from now the earth will be too hot for life as we know it to survive. So where will we go? We look to space. We look at places like Mars and the moon. In order to aim for high places such as Mars and the moon, we need to put our all into it. Since Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, NASA’s main mission was to get people to Mars.

“NASA” (the National Aeronautics and Space Association) is a branch in the U.S. government that is responsible for all government activity towards space. NASA is responsible for a lot in the U.S. since it first began in 1958. NASA was responsible for the United States’s first satellite in orbit, the first to put a man on the moon, the first to successfully reuse a space rocket, and is even responsible for the way half of our cellular devices work today. Despite all that NASA has done, it was only receiving 4% of the U.S. budget. In 2015, it’s budget was cut down to one-tenth of its budget. Then, in 2016, Obama made a promise to add 18.6 billion tax dollars to NASA’s budget. Now NASA is able to send the resources needed to supply the ISS (international space station). The ISS is a habitable satellite that is in low orbit above the earth. The ISS has two main purposes: researching stars, planets and space rocks; and experimenting on how human life works in space in order to get the human body used to space life.

Maybe life in space will be how we will live tomorrow. Maybe one day we will find life on a habitable planet. Will life in space be the way of tommorow? Will humankind break the limits of the way life works? Did I change the way you think of space? What planet or planets do you think we will set foot on next?

Dionel Grice is an 8th grade scholar at Friendship Tech Prep Academy.