[ConservativeMind]

However the space program is cool and it comforts me to know that every dollar spent on returning to the moon would be a dollar not buying food stamps.

But it's still a dollar taken by force from a taxpayer.

[metalcor]

Even worse-— it’s taken by force from taxpayers yet to be born.

[cripplecreek]

So was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

[Free Descendant]

Yeah I agree. My point is that I have a long list of programs to cry about before I get to the space program.

[messierhunter]

So are the dollars that launch the military rockets right next to the shuttle. Quite frankly, we don't have time to sit around waiting for there to be enough of a profit motive to establish a spaceflight infrastructure that takes us to the moon and back on a regular basis. There is a national security motive for us to maintain a manned spaceflight capability and to establish a lasting presence on the moon as quickly as possible. If we fail to do that then we turn our children's future over to foreign nations. The russians are discussing the possibility of deflecting Apophis themselves. Do we really want to leave our security up to the Russians? What if they botch it and make the threat more likely instead of less likely? And what if an even more likely threat is discovered? Now is not the time to be downsizing our capability to focus on "earth science" (gorebull warming).

The government should fill the role of building the early infrastructure in space that private companies can later utilize to get to the moon and beyond, but we're not there yet. SpaceX is utilizing government-built infrastructure to launch Falcon 9, and that's exactly the kind of thing we need to see happen with space-based infrastructure in the future. The problem is that we still need to build that space-based infrastructure, and we need to do it [i]first[/i], before other nations take control of the resources and strategical positions that make us dependent on them.