Paraphrased: Investing only $19 billion dollars a year is a no-brainer, considering the return is a generation of American kids interested in math and science.
This attitude has brought NASA to the lack of relevance we see today. Astronauts spending hours on video chat with middle-schoolers and the use of precious payload to put ant colonies into orbit are not serious ways to advance a space program. When NASA was about exploring and colonizing the final frontier, kids would join in and dream along. When the space program became about forcing science and technology in an artificial way down the same kids' throats, they tuned out. So few youngsters with an interest in space / SF exist today.
The thing with the ants is I only heard they were doing it, I never heard what they found out, and they never made it sound any fun. In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! he talks about his own ant experiments in an enlightening way, with a useful application of getting them away from his food without using poisons. We need more of that.
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Letting government to spend money in most of other directions is a waste.
Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples.
Only if you place low value on the scientific returns. Science research is one thing the private sector does poorly, and it's something NASA does a lot of.
The other main area is human spaceflight which you could say is wasteful, but NASA did a lot of the high cost low return R&D for human spaceflight. Now private companies can go into the effort with timescales that can keep investors happy.
If I don't need spaceflight in the next 100 years, there is no point spending valuable resources on researching human spaceflight. 100 years from now such research would be significantly less expensive and more meaningful.
I'd rather see valuable resources spend on what's important. For example on better rating system on HN.
Government is not capable of doing things like that.
You haven't proved money should be spent on the space program, you've proved money should be spent on X for all X. Though this does bear a certain resemblance to our budgetary priorities of late.
I say that private markets/individuals do a pretty good job deciding what technologies are worth long term investment dollars/charitable donations. Let them figure out what research programs they should be funding.
Yes, but... NASA does very little space science compared to non-scientific human space travel. Their budget for launching humans into space (Apollo, STS, ISS, Constellation) -- for shits and giggles, basically -- is orders of magnitude greater than their budget for actual science. Icy Moons, James Webb, LISA -- real science, real discovery -- tends to get budget-axed to make more room for politically-savvy STS, ISS, Flags on Mars.
Icy Moons -- first substantial progress in space probes in decades, long-delayed trial of nuclear electric propulsion -- not important enough. (Wikipedia says it was cancelled because of "shift in priorities" towards manned missions.) Order-of-magnitude greater I_sp than chemical rockets. Massive (1.5 tons payload), high-powered (200 kWe available) science juggernaut -- exploring Jupiter's moons, one by one. New frontiers in experiment capability: scanning mysterious moons with high-powered radars, spectrometers. Total budget less than the cost of cleaning up astronaut shit on ISS.
James Webb -- Hubble's successor is killed. Hubble has no successor! This is a national shame. A hundred times more powerful, the greatest space telescope of all time, so perceptive it has to be positioned in sun-earth L2 to get away from earthshine.
LISA -- undiscovered gravity radiation? Resolving relativistic emissions of distant black holes, making new tests of Einsteinean general relativity? Sounds like nerd stuff, who cares.
In theory, it is nice that we have a government agency funding pure exploration of the cosmos (any funding, at all). In practice, NASA is a case study of how badly putting science funding in the hands of a political bureaucracy can go wrong. Very few Americans, sadly, actually understand or care about the comparatively bland-looking experiments which are science, which advance human understanding, compared to TV-friendly astronaut acrobatics tripe. So science gets marginalized; the political nature of NASA favors useless shit.
I say euthanize NASA, it has no life left.
In fact, for the most part, science missions at NASA are now, and have been, guided by reports of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Science. They produce "Decadal Surveys" which basically are ranked lists of mission proposals.
There's one for Earth Science, in particular, that has been very closely tracked by NASA mission proposals (see http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/decadal-surveys/). Every potential mission team scrutinizes this list and tries to position their work to be responsive to these science goals. For the list of mission concepts, see http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11820&page=8...
The menu of missions is rather amazing in its scope, novelty, and potential to advance the understanding of Earth systems like pollution, aerosols, solid earth hazards, land use, vegetation, weather, etc.
"US lawmakers vote to kill Hubble successor"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gLvaDP1Tm...
I don't argue that NASA doesn't do useful science, but that their useful science is crowded out by big-budget, 12-figure manned space missions, and that its political nature (it is a government agency) is the reason for this.
What I'm trying to say is that you're focusing on a couple of high-profile examples, and the politics don't have the all-encompassing effect that you think they do.
(I love politics, and I'm very interested in the interplay between missions and politics, but your estimate of the interaction is way, way overblown.)
There are some "poster children" for the influence of politics in NASA. JWST is one, Hubble was another, so is/was the manned program (Constellation and its predecessors), and also some elements of the Mars program.
It's appropriate that politics influence some of this. It's citizens who fund this work, and their representatives, for better and worse, vote on funding. The portions of NASA that are most visible externally (same as the list in the previous paragraph) are the most subject to politics.
[[ Note on JWST: it was not cancelled, as you seem to think. The House voted against it. But all its support is in the Senate (Sen. Barbara M.'s district includes GSFC and STScI, which run JWST) and there's no way it will be cancelled. NASA watchers know this. But JWST is being sent a message, because it is way over-budget. And that is the politician's business. ]]
The political process described above is very distasteful to nerds.
But that's not all there is, and my references to the Earth program above were intended to illustrate that. That roadmap I linked to has about 12-20 missions planned out to 2020 that will have a huge impact, and there's very little political influence there. It's nerd's wet dream, a bunch of scientists at the National Academies contemplating what measurements will best advance the efficacy of various earth system models.
Modeling accuracy does not interest the citizenry, except when they want to know a hurricane's path or the amount of seismic deformation of an earthquake or what the water levels in reservoirs will be next year or what forests are healthy or ...
So the question comes down to proportion. I don't know the most recent figures, but various "science" stuff is certainly more than 1/3, probably almost 1/2, of the NASA budget. One can argue about the boundary cases.