The "money could be better spent" argument seems kind of silly when you think about how much more money is spent on efforts directly or indirectly related to ki

The "money could be better spent" argument seems kind of silly when you think about how much more money is spent on efforts directly or indirectly related to killing people. As long as that's still a thing, I don't have a word to say about the humanistic benefits of NASA's funding. Anyway, the point of NASA and space exploration is to inspire people, to fill them with wonder and dreams, and that is invaluable. Humans want to actually go into space, sending robots and telescopes is just in service of that. There are many ways that we could better focus our efforts to solve various Earthly problems, and we're generally doing other things with our time and resources. Of those things, I would say researching space travel is pretty low on the list of targets for redistribution.