If you were told that for every dollar you send to the U.S. Treasury to pay the government’s bills only one cent of it went to NASA would you think we were spending too much money on space exploration?

What if you found out that last year China graduated 500,000 engineers, India graduated 300,000 engineers and we only graduated 60,000? Would you start to worry about our future as a scientific pioneer?

I’m going to guess your response is we’re not doing enough to back space exploration. I’m not entirely convinced of that, but after meeting three trailblazing astronauts Saturday I’m inclined to think they’re right. Scott Carpenter, the first man to penetrate inner and outer space and one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, joined Gemini and Apollo astronaut Lt. Gen. Thomas Stafford and Capt. Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, for a special event at South Coast Plaza sponsored by Omega watches as the 40th anniversary approaches this month of  Apollo 11 when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon.

During the presentation the three, along with Ed Buckabee, the media affairs representative for Gemini and Apollo, reminisced about their space missions. Much of it involved the charming anecdotes that usually come out of these nostalgic orbits. Like when Cernan recalled how he knocked off the fender of a moon rover. “I called the president of General Motors at the time when it was the real General Motors and said, ‘Where’s road-side assistance when you need it?’ ”

It’s a great laugh line, but I sensed Cernan starting to work himself up into a lather about the state of space exploration. His reference to the “real General Motors” was an obvious comment on the government takeover of GM. He also passionately recalled President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s after the Russians had gotten a head start initially spooking an already paranoid United States with the launching of Sputnik during the Cold War.

“The Russians were putting monkeys, dogs, refrigerators, everything you can imagine into space. The Russians owned space,” he said. “And three weeks after Alan Shepard (when he became the first American to orbit the earth) even we didn’t have the vaguest idea how to get up there [to the moon].”

Cernan equated Kennedy’s challenge to the “risk and boldness” it took to sign the Declaration of Independence.

That it was. Spending that much money for a moon landing was unpopular at the time, but the Kennedy administration managed to sell the program to the public based on the expected scientific findings. Kennedy, the wily politician, knew the country needed a home run to win the propaganda war with the Soviets and he was right.

But now what’s the point of spending so much money on going to the moon again when we’re so broke? It’s a hard sell after the nearly full-on collapse of our economy that touched off a global crisis that has us in the worst shape since the Great Depression. Wouldn’t that money be better spent domestically than on going somewhere we’ve already visited? When Cernan left the moon in December, 1972 he was the last to step foot on the planet.

“I sat on God’s front porch for three days and I’m still trying to figure out what that meant,” Cernan said.

He was speaking existentially, of course. But one could also extend that question to the practical as well. What good did it do us?

A lot, say the astronauts. The moon landing inspired a generation to pursue careers in math and science and since then we’ve fallen way behind the rest of the world.

They have a point there, in my opinion. We have become a consumer country. We have a massive trade deficit because all we do is buy. What do we have to sell that the rest of the world needs? Aside from pop culture, what is there really? We are in the technological revolution and I believe the currency of the future — the most important exportable product — will be ideas. And those ideas will come from pushing ourselves to achieve technologically difficult goals like a manned trip to Mars. I recall when President Bush was mocked for advocating this in one of his state of the union addresses, and probably rightfully so since he didn’t really spell out any specifics, but I thought we ought to at least consider the idea. The timing was poor as well since the Iraq war was going so badly.

So I asked Cernan afterward about the hard sell to taxpayers already angry about bailing out corporations like AIG that were in large part responsible for tanking the economy. He reiterated the point that less than one penny of every dollar we send to the government goes to space exploration.

“We’re printing money and throwing it away, just giving it away,” to companies like AIG, so why not spend it on something worthwhile like NASA, Cernan said.

Cernan cited the dozens of children eagerly hanging on the words of the astronauts during the presentation. “If one of those kids walk away today with an interest in science then our visit was worthwhile.”

Buckabee noted that at the time Kennedy began Apollo the country wrestled with a deficit, but he was wise enough to make sure there was money for space exploration.

I suggested another selling point. If President Obama is serious about developing green technology to replace our dying industries then why not point to space exploration as a way to achieve that? We’ll need green technology to compete in the 21st Century. We could exploit our already vast resources in space to help with the research, right? But we’ll need the researchers, the engineers, the scientists to do that. And the best way to do that, they said, was to inspire them with a mission — like going to Mars.

“If we don’t compete and turn over the moon’s surface to the Chinese how are we going to manage our assets there,” Buckabee asked?

And we’ve already sunk billions of dollars in the International Space Station. What if we cut it off and we can’t even get there anymore, Cernan wondered.

They seem concerned that President Obama has ordered a review of the Ares I and Ares V projects. That review’s recommendations are due next month. Ares I and Ares V are meant to ultimately take us to Mars and allow us to take multiple trips to the space station and elsewhere like we did in the old days — with rocket ships, not the space shuttle, which was like a jet that landed on a runway. The International Space Station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be done by 2011 and operate until at least 2015. The financing of it has always been complicated as so many countries from Russia, Japan, Canada and 10 European countries chip in along with the U.S.

Stafford, who chairs NASA’s Advisory Task Force on the International Space Station, says NASA has been shortchanged by $11 billion in funding from 2005 to 2010. If we don’t fund the space station from 2010 to 2015 the Russians will take over the leadership of it, Stafford said. He blames bureaucrats in Washington for the shortchanging.

What’s the solution? He advocates a revival of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. It started in 1958 during the Eisenhower administration and continued through 1973 when President Nixon shut it down. It was revived briefly during President Bush 41’s administration from 1989 to 1993 when President Clinton closed it again. Back then it was known as the National Space Council and the mission then was to send a manned spacecraft to Mars. Vice President Dan Quayle led the council [insert joke here, if you please]. Stafford believes if the council, which would include cabinet members and NASA representatives, were back in charge the mission would be clear. Carpenter and Buckabee agreed.

“The [Office of Management and Budget] needs adult supervision,”Stafford said, smiling. As the one astronaut who has had the most experience working with politicians and who led a historic mission between astronauts and cosmonauts he still knows how to be diplomatic, but with just enough edge to get your attention.

Obama has said he wants to revive the National Space Council, but his support came after he suggested diverting some NASA money elsewhere and came under fire for it in states where NASA is headquartered — like Texas and more significantly swing-state Florida. Will he keep his promise? Next month we’ll get a strong indication.

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