NASA is a way to channel money to the US Military Industrial Complex. Rockets of the form of SLS are relevant not only to space exploration, but obviously to mi

NASA is a way to channel money to the US Military Industrial Complex. Rockets of the form of SLS are relevant not only to space exploration, but obviously to missile and ICBM/equivalent design. Boeing is maintained as a competitor for Airbus for national competitive reasons. As are the other contractors for NASA and the general MIC itself. The MIC is the biggest socialist redistribution of wealth in existence, it takes $800B/year from taxpayers and redistributes it to the relevant companies, which in return, commit to providing employment and general wealth distribution. The MIC even beats out the US Department of Agriculture, which is the most "socialist" of all the US departments. NASA does great stuff, it's science is unparalleled in the space world, but the projects and systems that are developed, particularly for space as opposed to aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) use space as the excuse for the wealth distribution. There's actually nothing wrong with that. EU has had national "champions" as companies for centuries. It just doesn't fit with the conventional view that the US is a "free capitalist market".