Really? Better to let the needy starve so we can crash a piece of precision avionics againt a rock 10,000 miles away.
yes, there's a neo-enlightened logic to that.
Who said they would starve? Nothing is stopping people from voluntarily helping the poor if they so chose to do so. But we've spent close to $10 trillion on welfare since the 1960s and what do we have to show for it? We have more people on welfare than ever now. That spending hasn't bought us jack squat.
The space program, on the other hand, helped to foster a new level of technological achievement that has helped to make many lives all over the world much better. The academic knowledge gained from space travel has helped us to better understand the science behind how the universe operates and hell, helped us to even win the Cold War.
The amount of money also spent on the space program is literally orders of magnitude less than what we've spent on welfare, and the former has much more of a productive legacy than the latter.