I'm saying don't send tax payer dollars to be burned into the void of space when that same money could be used to improve the quality of people's lives here on earth. For sure it's better to waste it efficiently than inefficiently. But even better to not waste it at all.
GPS was a military project. Now we use it for everything from finding grandma's house to locating lost hikers.
The tech behind spy satellites is now used to monitor farming fields, increasing crop yields and reducing food costs. The same tech is used in telescopes like Hubble, teaching us so much about the universe and how nature works.
And it's not like the money gets burned or sent into space with the satellites. It's spent here on earth. A $1B contract with SpaceX doesn't just go into Elon's pocket and then he magics up a rocket. SpaceX employs thousands of people.
And space is a tiny fraction of the spending of all governments on the planet. Cut the military budget of the US by 10% and you could feed every hungry child, have a proper health care system, pay to reform the police system. Cut the budget spent on space, you wouldn't put a dent in those problems and you'd lose out on all the benefits we get.
I don't buy into the job creation dogma. The government could pay thousands of people to push a boulder up a mountain... Then these boulder pushers can use their salaries to pay for food, healthcare and accommodation... Are the cooks, doctors and builders on the other side of the deal getting a good deal here? No. the boulder pushers got something for nothing and so did the guy who manages the boulder pushers. Society is worse off because the boulder pushers could have used the same skills to harvest food, for example.
GPS and the Internet were both invented by military, so I get that point... But that was a different time, there were different kinds of people in charge and people had more principles. When was the last innovation from the military which served the public interest?
The defense sector is a big source of funding for basic scientific research. That stuff takes a while to pay off -- decades, usually. GPS and the Internet are old because of that; when they were more recent investments, they weren't useful (yet).
One of the more recent massive success stories is KeyHole, which became Google Maps. It was originally funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm.
