Just to further this point: NASA receives for its yearly budget 12 days of the military's budget, not counting expenses in the wars.
12 days of the budget for the entire us military sounds like a pretty damn good amount of money. Quick lookup indicates that's something like 21 billion dollars.
The real question is, what makes the military 30 times more important than space exploration, given that we are leaving days of (relative) peace?
At this point, the military is (in-part) a jobs program, both blue collar and white.
Much of the jobs money is coming out of the war money, which is not included in that figure.
Surely we can create a better jobs program with that money?
It's a much larger jobs program
Right. Because a single rover on the moon is more "active" than the 5 active space programs, including 2 active rovers, that NASA has on Mars.
Thanks. And Cassini at Saturn, New Horizons on its way to Pluto, Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and Planck; STEREO and SDO looking at the Sun, and a host of Earth-observing missions (http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/missions/), etc., etc.
Some of the comments above are not very well-informed.
No we don't. We operate at a trillion dollar deficit per year. How does that translate into having plenty of money? Should we borrow from the Chinese to compete with them?