NASA does both manned and unmanned stuff. Don't conflate those when you are looking at returns.

Look at this joke of a list https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best things they could come up with.

There are actually a lot of really interesting discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about whether it represents value for money, but I would say that that is anything but "a joke of a list."

And 'Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy' is a joke. Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?

Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity on humans, pretty much everything else could have been done cheaper and better without humans.

Or take this example:

> Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.

Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned space station to deploy them. Similar with many other 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.

See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."

And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The best they have to offer.

> Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?

Welcome to the macroeconomics practical, where we'll dig a ditch, refill it, and count it as a productive addition to the economy both times!

If doing it lowers the cost of earth movers and gets 20 other groups to each dig their own ditch, that's actually money well spent.

No, it depends on what else you could have spent the money on. Perhaps that would have been even better?

This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.

Well, also that spending on needless digging would have been the best use of the resources. Instead of spending on something more immediately useful (or leaving the money with the taxpayers).

There's really many, many more lower-hanging fruits in tax spend even in science funding alone, that's significantly more of a "waste of resources" than manned space program, and drastically more so in tax spending in general. Why not focus on those more, instead of attacking one of the few remaining things where people still try to do something ambitious, constructive, and forward-looking, and one that has a hugely disproportionate and positive impact on promoting interest in science and engineering?

But I've already noticed that some people think sportsball and adtech salaries are enough to build society's mythos around, so whatever.

Also, it's NASA, so they can't come out and say "stopped soviet rocket technology and expertise from proliferating" which was a large motivator for the ISS.

> with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.

If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA

Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly launch people and things into space.

Well, NASA itself is a good counterexample here:

NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't (have to) launch primates into space.

The track record of NASA sending stuff to space is pretty bleak

Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.

Of course, that's partially a tax optimisation.