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Astronaut: US spends too little on space

Katie de la Rosa

Don't all children at one point say they want to be astronauts or doctors when they grow up?

Well, Dr. Robert "Bobby" Satcher became both.

Introduced as "the man whose orbit inspires orbits," Satcher told hundreds of middle school students at the Heymann Center on Friday what it's like to be an astronaut and physician.

"To explore the universe and search for life, to me, is NASA's most important mission," Satcher said. He trained and worked starting in 2004 as a medical officer on space shuttles. His discussion Friday was part of the Living Legends program organized by the National Medical Association, Dr. Joseph Henry Tyler Jr. Chapter.

The United States spends the most in the world on space exploration, but compared to its other expenditures, Satcher said it's not a lot and not enough. In 2003, before budget cuts trimmed the space shuttle program, every American spent $11.85 in taxes every year toward those costs. That made up the nation's $3.26 billion budget on space operations, which Satcher said sounds like a lot before comparing it to the $299 billion spent for defense.

Satcher, a surgeon at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was one of nine physicians in a staff of 60 astronauts. Although physicians regularly participated in non-medical experiments — and even got to space walk — their main priority was to care for the crew. Six in every 10 people on a shuttle will become ill from space motion sickness, even the most experienced pilots and engineers, Satcher said.

"We were there to keep them healthy," he said.

Even still, doctors had to train like astronauts in order to blast off into the universe with them. That required land survival and water survival training, the latter of which was performed in neutrally buoyant space suits in swimming pools.

Perhaps the most unexpected, and certainly the silliest, tool Satcher had to get training to use was "the space toilet."

"That thing is complicated," he said, over the giggles of the students. "It's a whole process to go up there."

Still in the aftermath of crippling budget cuts, Satcher said a newly popular opinion is that NASA should send only robots instead of humans to space. The money available should be spent toward building more sophisticated machines, so the belief goes, and not put people in dangerous situations with insufficient resources.

"Imagine if we hadn't been courageous and sent humans in the first place!" Satcher exclaimed. "Imagine everything we wouldn't have discovered and explored!"

Space exploration progresses every year, but Satcher estimated it's still 30 or so years away before it can answered the most frequently asked question: Is there life beyond Earth?

"The key to finding out," Satcher said, "is to keep exploring the universe. We can't ever stop."