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.
You still don't get it. All research has spin-offs. Getting something done by government is the most wasteful and inefficient way to do anything. If the same budget that's spent on NASA were allocated by the marketplace you would get more in terms of innovation because you wouldn't have to work on things like large rocket engines which have absolutely no other use that powering rockets. And we've exhaustively proven that Mars consists of rocks and dirt. Something that anyone with a college degree in chemistry could have determined. NASA is just welfare and government dependency for engineers and scientists. BTW did you read Bastiat?