It's not at all clear that NASA has paid for itself in economic benefits to the civilian economy. Most analyses are sponsored by NASA. To the extent that it has

It's not at all clear that NASA has paid for itself in economic benefits to the civilian economy. Most analyses are sponsored by NASA. To the extent that it has had benefits, most of these could be obtained from the satellite programs, scientific programs like Hubble, and unmanned robotic mission. The manned spaceflight is a largely useless program that has huge operations costs beyond the R&D costs. IIRC, at one time the early development of integrated circuits was boasted as a spinoff of space programs. However, it turned out to be a spinoff of classified missile programs by the Air Force and Navy.