[throwit99]

Do you really think that firstly, those technologies only exist because of NASA, and secondly that the cheapest way to innovate is to pick some arbitrary aim (Space exploration) and then spin off lots of innovation from it?

You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers.

edit: banned now, so I can't add any comments. It's really surprising just how extreme the religion of science is sometimes. Scary.

[csallen]

Space exploration isn't all about side-effects.

Humanity cannot survive on the Earth for eternity. Eventually we will have to move on to other habitable worlds. Doing so is an almost unimaginably difficult engineering task. This reason alone is sufficient to justify space exploration in my mind.

On a shorter time scale, there are massive amounts of resources in space that, with better technology, we could theoretically harvest for our use here on Earth. Once again, this is incredibly difficult to accomplish and won't happen without learning from experiments.

In the present, satellites are extremely beneficial to humanity, and factor into our everyday lives. In addition, space telescopes and space stations facilitate research that couldn't be done on Earth.

[ommunist]

Yeah, m8. With Musk to Mars!

[CocaKoala]

> You could do a better job just taking the money spent on space exploration, and opening some innovation/invention centers.

That is an extraordinary claim that I'd like to see some evidence of. Having an end goal presents you with a number of problems to solve, which then give you an opportunity to innovate. Simply throwing money at somebody and asking them to come up with something doesn't seem like it would be nearly as productive as saying "We need to put a man in space and have him not die and then have him come back to earth and not crash" and then breaking that down into the smaller set of problems which need to be solved for that to happen.

[sondr3]

Well, they do now and from what we've seen funding space research leads to loads of technology. We already have innovation/invention centers, but having loads of people focused on one incredibly hard task will bring out lots of awesome stuff.