Is Space Exploration Really Necessary 1. How important is it to explore our solar system?
2. Is space exploration really necessary? In the hours after Curiosity launched last month, there were more than a few people questioning the worth of spending two and a half billion dollars to launch a spacecraft to Mars. This is absolutely a fair question to ask. It’s important to place the question in context, because most people in the general public think NASA gets a much larger fraction of the U.S. budget than it actually does (people tend to think it gets five or even 15 or 20 percent of the budget, when the actual number is about 0.4 percent).
