Not long after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, critics were voicing concern over the cost of human spaceflight. The question "Couldn't the money spent on getting three men to the moon be better spent taking care of problems right here on Earth?" has been heard ever since in one form or another.

There are those who ask to this day: "If we can land men on the moon, why can't we cure disease, feed the hungry?" The argument is a noble one, but a flawed one.

First of all, we can no longer land anyone on the moon; that capability ended with the Apollo program. Today, we do not have the vehicles or infrastructure required to support lunar missions. New piloted vehicles would have to be developed to escape Earth orbit and operate on the lunar surface. (Such vehicles, incidentally, could be deployed from the space shuttle.)

Funding for Apollo was cut back. Therefore, money should have been freed up to cure disease, feed the hungry and generally do the things that well-meaning social critics thought could be done if only human spaceflight spending were cut or eliminated altogether.

Not only did human spaceflight spending decline after Apollo. So did NASA's overall budget, both in inflation-adjusted terms and as a percentage of gross national product. Despite some increases during the Reagan-Bush years, NASA budgets declined by some 50 percent since the heyday of Apollo.

Consider: NASA's peak budget was about $5.5 billion in 1966 ($28 billion in 1999 dollars). The current annual NASA budget is about $13.9 billion (roughly $2.7 billion in 1966 dollars).

The Clinton administration, after cutting NASA's budget for seven straight years, finally decided NASA should get a slight increase during this record U.S. economic boom, which is now nearly a decade old.

Where are the cures for diseases? Society has not only had to deal with diseases that were around during Apollo, but new ones such as AIDS have come along. Other diseases became resistant to vaccines that were developed to eliminate them.

Meanwhile, the numbers of the poor remain large, and a newer classification of unfortunate people is known to society as "the homeless."

Why haven’t the cutbacks in human spaceflight been acknowledged by critics? Plans for space stations, Mars missions and lunar bases have repeatedly been canceled, postponed or scaled back because of NASA budget cuts. But money saved from these programs apparently didn't help solve social problems.

In recent years, there's been growing skepticism about government's ability to help the needy, with much of the questioning coming from Republicans. Could it be that social problems require more than just vast amounts of money? And how much of that money has gone to the people who actually need it?

Where are the cures for diseases? Society has not only had to deal with diseases that were around during Apollo, but new ones such as AIDS have come along.
     

To be sure, NASA could be more efficient in its conduct of human space exploration. But until private industry actually establishes a foothold in space, NASA is the only game in town. Moreover, the agency has an outstanding track record.

As for some scientists, they seem to believe space is and always will be their exclusive domain, that it's a dangerous place that humans simply shouldn't be in. But the point of human space exploration is exploration, not just gathering scientific data. Humans and robotic probes complement one another.

NASA has seen its budget greatly reduced over the past three decades. It's time for critics of human spaceflight to recognize that saying "money spent on human spaceflight could be better spent elsewhere" is a tired old argument; its relevance disappeared along with our ability to reach the moon.