One can enable the other: space programs keep top engineers in the country, and this has big network effects that push up the entire economy... So you end up w

One can enable the other: space programs keep top engineers in the country, and this has big network effects that push up the entire economy... So you end up with more money to feed starving people from! (...not that you'd do that with the $, but anyway). Like it or not we engineers like to work on interesting problems and don't really give much thought to social issues, so if you want the super smart engineers to meaningfully contribute to a society and economy instead of emigrating or refactoring themselves into oligarchs you need to give them interesting science and technology problems to work on. Once you have a richer economy, the problem you wanted to solve in the first place gets waaaay easier!