This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.