Science isn't about significantly increasing the quality of life for people, it is about learning objective things concerning our reality. Improving our quality of life is a side effect of knowing what we're doing instead of flailing about blindly.
You want a practical application? Fine. Knowing the properties of moon rocks allows us to increase our knowledge of Earth's geological history (being that the moon consists of matter ejected from Earth long in the past) and allows us to better plan future moon missions. This will make it easier for us to build an outpost or colony on the moon. Before you ask why we should ever do that, it is so we may make our species more able to avoid extinction and to harvest resources, such as the HE3 on the Lunar poles. Before you ask what that is for, nuclear fusion.
E is not an element, and hydrogen isn't exactly something required from the moon (Methinks you meant He3)
Besides that, you want the government to be prioritizing potentially worthless discoveries over, say, improving the quality of life of its citizens?
Why not just make it a non profit organization separate from the government? That not only reduces waste that comes with being a government program (for example, hiring a standing army of aerospace engineers and bureaucrats when less would do), it also means that people actually interested would be funding it through donations. I'd probably donate to a kickstarter for NASA. Makes more sense then having the government run it, at any rate.
Perhaps you missed the memo, but space is the most deadly environment out there. Our method of reaching it is very dangerous. Shit will happen. The shit that happens will be expensive because this is a relatively new and high-tech field. The failures of the present, however, are nothing compared to the explosive madness of the early space programs of both the US and USSR, where almost as many rockets exploded on the launch pad as managed to get into space.
I'm not just talking about Columbia and so on, but times where excessive amounts of money were spent on forgotten projects, failed designs (even persisting long after being proven to not work), and unneeded overhead (again, that standing army of engineers and bureaucrats).
As we told you before, there is an entire magazine for NASA's innovations alone. Go read it if you want more specifics.
I read through some of the things invented by NASA (and it does, notably, include things that were invented by companies contracted by NASA as well) and thought there were some useful things, but not $750 billion worth of useful things. If NASA invented anything ground breaking like the DoD did, I guarantee you would be showing it off by this point.
And if we took the DoD's budget from 1962 to 2012 adjusted for inflation and added it together?
The DoD was protecting the US against the Red Menace, at least that's what they say. I already said I'm entirely in favour of cutting the DoD significantly, and doing that long before cutting from NASA, so I'm not seeing what your argument is here. They STILL produced far more of value than NASA ever did after letting their discoveries trickle into the commercial sector, and their discoveries are neither "science for its own sake" nor is most of their budget dedicated to R&D.
To think that they should die instead is just plain bloodthirsty.
I don't think that's quite what he meant. Obviously, the happiest world is one in which everyone is fed and alive. However, where do they get their food again?
It actually takes a fair bit of money and research to "scale down" for asymmetric warfare. That transition has been in the works for at least 15 years now. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, we knew that the majority of our future combats would involve enemies who absolutely could not stand before us. But they could disperse and wage guerilla warfare and our Cold War-era force was ill-equipped for that. It's like trying to fend off a swarm of gnats with a bazooka. So we've spent decades and billions of dollars figuring out how to reconfigure our forces for less bazookas and more flyswatters.
Of course, one fear now is that if there's ever a serious engagement with China, we're going to wish we still had that "big war" Army instead.
The other problem is that technology is a force multiplier. A HUGE one. But we've become so dependant on that force multiplier to tilt the odds our way that we're neglecting a lot of basics. Take away that multiplier and our army might not be able to stand up so well against competitors. Most of Chinese defense policy vis-a-vis the United States hinges on denying us our fancy toys if shit ever goes hot. Take away GPS, take away remote drones, take away EWACS....the US would paralyzed in combat. There's a growing countercurrent within the Armed Forces that wants us to become less reliant on our technology because it's becoming an Achilles' heel.
The cheapest and most straightforward solution here would be for the US to avoid aggressive wars from the get go, of course.
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