We’ve been “ten years away from fusion and abundant energy from fusion” for the better part of a century now. In the last fifty years, we’ve sent hundreds of shuttle missions into space to do … basically nothing. We’re studying growing tomatoes in space at a cost of thousands of dollars a minute. It’s not going anywhere. The most interesting thing we’ve done is space telescopes. Okay cool, we’ve discovered the answers to future jeopardy questions, again, at a cost of thousands of dollars to let some self important astronomers take pictures and write equations that might or might not even mean anything. If you’re going to tax me for space exploration, is it too much to ask that we make some actual progress? We’re still doing the same sorts of make-work experiments that we were in 1975.

I just don’t see it. I can get behind the government funding medical research that might well prevent or cure a disease. Or to the FDA and Dept of Agriculture to control how much actual poison and microplastics are in the food supply. Those things benefit actual humans on earth. NASA has done basically fuck all, including building a launch vehicle (the boosters are basically repurposed ICBMs and the moon landing was a missile development and scare-the-USSR program disguised as space exploration). Now the Cold War is over and the Soviets are gone. We aren’t really going to go into space, and it’s past time to stop funding an agency dedicated to totally not being cover for a weapons program.