Manned space missions that go more than "just passed the exosphere", making sure people with the pre-existing condition called "old" and "dirt poor" and the ext

Manned space missions that go more than "just passed the exosphere", making sure people with the pre-existing condition called "old" and "dirt poor" and the extra-duper fun combination "old and dirt poor" are actually not left to die on the streets with a simple infection, networks of massive national laboratories whose prime mission is to secure technologies and advance science for one of the most technologically advanced and by far most innovative countries on earth (perhaps not in the adoption of personal electronics, but we surely laid the foundation for all innovation, not the least of which was von Neumann and his work with Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC, the first programmed computer). Those labs take several billion a year each to operate, and have arguably single-handedly placed and kept the US at the forefront of technology for decades. I'm not going to pussy-foot around it, we spend 50% of our tax dollar on defense, and most of that into personnel and pure weapons r&d and manufacturing. It's a shame, but it's the truth. Just imagine if we could refocus those dollars elsewhere (in an ideal world, anyway), where would we be now? More importantly, why hasn't private industry come and done it for us?