I can see you've fully drunk the NASA Koolaid. You have a remarkable lack of understanding of what really goes on in R&D if you think that we wouldn't have those innovations without the space program. I refer you to Bastiat's That which is seen and that which is not seen As a starting place to open your eyes to the wastefulness of GOVERNMENT sponsored research.
We wouldn’t have them because many of the benefits have been ‘spin-offs’. Those are things that you discover when you were trying to do something else. Aerospace and Military research has all sorts of spinoffs. But that is irreverent because you totally missed my point when you decided I was somehow defending the ‘wasteful government research’.
Why don’t you spend all this bluster and effort attacking the parts of the government that are 100% useless and cut the ones that are 50% useless last. Go cut the ones that employ thousands of bureaucrats and paper pushers and save the ones that employ thousands of engineers for when there is nothing left to cut.