I've always actually liked NASA as a US government agency. Thing is they take the kind of scientist whose skills are intensely useful to the military industrial complex and let them do goofy shit like this that doesn't hurt anyone instead. Sure, sometimes some of their tech ends up useful to the military anyway and that's terrible, but to the people who think this is a waste of resources that could have been better spent fixing infrastructure or helping the poor I want to ask:
If we consider labor as a resource, do you think the actual experts in autonamous robotics, rocketry and atmospheric dispersion involved in landing a little box on Venus would be fixing pot holes or running homeless shelters without NASA? I think they would be much more likely to be working on some project to have an army of drones defoliate all of central Asia or something like that. I think it is cool and heartwarming that they successfully landed a little robot on Mars and care so much about it, but also many of these people have skills that are only useful for exactly this and like 25 different crimes against humanity, and letting them do this is not a waste of resources.
NASA represents 0.25% of the federal budget. A quarter of one percent.
We could have 57 NASAs for what we spend on one DoD. We could have nearly 100 for what we spend on one HHS.
NASA also has a ridiculously high ROI from their library of patents, too. Probably one of the highest.
This is kind of a bad way to look at it though...you can't really put a monetary value on what we get back from HHS or even really DoD. There's a lot of bad, but it's also what keeps America the economic powerhouse that it is, through all of our soft power and protecting global trade routes. We still put in far too much to both (although DoD could be one of the few functional example of trickle-down economics there is, since most spending stays domestic)
It's usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)
If that's not both sad and happy, then why am I reading this through tears?
It seems a better expenditure than flinging cars into outer space, but that's just me. 🤷
