Too much human intelligence is spent on space missions. Imagine what we could achieve if this intelligence was spent on useful things which affect regular people in our society.
The costs vs benefits of space exploration are not balanced at all.
The costs vs benefits of space exploration are not balanced at all.
Space travel was helped/made possible by military research (beginning with the Nazi regime), and then over the decades each r&d helped the other side to advance. Internet? Military origin. Some forms of long range comms? Space.
Or, when we want to generalize to all forms of r&d deemed "wasteful", much research in the car space was being done in the Formula 1 and later trickled down to consumer cars - the only case in which trickle down politics actually work. Many antibiotics and other medical agents came from researching rare animals in remote countries.
My point still stands that it's a wasteful way to reach those targets.
Quite often in science we do not know the targets beforehand. Quite often we just happen to study/research something and out falls something else with very practical use (after minor adjustments and a little bit of out of the box thinking) we did not imagine was there.