I don't think it's unfair to consider the opportunity cost of pursuing these things versus providing social services. Eisenhower points to a similar tradeoff in

I don't think it's unfair to consider the opportunity cost of pursuing these things versus providing social services. Eisenhower points to a similar tradeoff in his Chance for Peace speech: > Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Now admittedly this is talking about about the cost of the military industrial complex rather than the cost of scientific pursuits. But I'm sure someone could make a case for the Apollo program merely being an ICBM manufacturing program in a trench coat.