On Thursday, Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas and Charles Bolden, the current administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), sparred over why does the United States space agency exists and what should be its focus?

According to Cruz, NASA's prime focus should be space exploration, but the space agency has been losing its focus and spending too much of its budget on 'earth science'. Cruz said that every individual in the country would agree that the core function of the space agency is to explore space. That is the thing that would inspire a child and many other Americans, Cruz added.

On the other hand, Bolden did not agree with Cruz's statement. According to Bolden, the studies that the scientists of NASA have been conducting on earth are absolutely critical for space exploration. During a subcommittee hearing on President Obama's $18.5 billion budget request for the space agency, the former NASA astronaut said that the agency's core business from the beginning has been to explore space and earth's environment. The agency wants to make the planet a better place to live, he added.

To prove his point, Cruz showed some charts that demonstrated a more than 40% increase in the budget of earth science and a more than 7% decrease in space exploration projects.

In response, the NASA administrator said that Cruz could not confirm the numbers. According to Bolden, there could be a drop in space exploration and it was because the agency has been working to make space flight cheaper as the agency's aim is to go deeper into the solar system.

This is not the first time when the space agency has been criticized for spending huge amount of money on exploration missions that seem irrelevant to life on Earth. According to Bolden, "We can't go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don't know it - and that understands our environment".