Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending NASA. I'm defending the long-term value of space flight, and rejecting the idea that we have to get our affairs perfectly

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending NASA. I'm defending the long-term value of space flight, and rejecting the idea that we have to get our affairs perfectly in order down here before we can head up into space. First of all, our affairs will never be perfectly in order, there will always be something else to fix - do you truly expect utopia to be achieved before we can allow ourselves to spend ANY resources on space? Second of all, if we suddenly stop all spending on space, all that money will not magically get redirected to humanitarian purposes (ok, a bit of a strawman, you never claim it would). Third, even if ALL the resources were redirected to good use, it would likely be for short-term fixes rather than any systemic gains. I firmly believe that we can and SHOULD do both. NASA isn't the right model - something like the X PRIZE is much more exciting. The same is true of saving the world - pouring billions into humanitarian aid might work for specific short-term goals, but we need different models for long-term change - the obvious being more stable political and economic conditions to allow a self-sustaining standard of living. It's a false dichotomy because, depending on who you ask, you can ALWAYS find a thing Y that is worth doing more than X. Given enough patience and small enough steps, I'm sure it's possible to build a chain of things that are increasingly higher priority to achieve, that nonetheless ends up being perfectly circular, like Escher's staircase.