Why not reduce the amount of money spent on space exploration and increase spending on social programmes?
A. NASA’s funding represents about one penny out of every dollar in the U.S. federal budget (down from a peak of four cents per dollar at the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s). Diverting this money into social programs would provide a very minimal increase for those immediate funding needs, while eliminating resources for one of the few federal agencies devoted to the future. Such a move could forfeit new solutions to our social and economic problems in favour of the limited means that we already know.
