A big part of why this kind of space research is worth doing is weapons development. That is a big part of why huge money goes to space research - because it's

A big part of why this kind of space research is worth doing is weapons development. That is a big part of why huge money goes to space research - because it's more efficient to give that cash to JPL than to Raytheon in terms of developing certain kinds of rocketry and robotics technologies. In comparison, many other branches of science work on much leaner budgets, and sending stuff to space actually does look very wasteful from a "$ per paper" perspective. If you disregard the weapons development value, there is actually very little reason to do these big-money experiments that could instead support the research of hundreds or thousands of more frugal science experiments. At the same time, there are lots of ways to do space research more cheaply, like launching small satellites. Most of the people who don't like this stuff are against the billion-dollar single missions rather than against astrophysics or against the concept of sending things to space. Many of them also are against the FCC project at CERN, for example.