After being asked this question countless times, I decided to write about it. I answer only to a select few individuals. The reason being, you cannot play chess with a pigeon. All it will do is flap its wings, disrupt all the pieces on the board, and fly away for you to put it back together. You can convince a person only if they are willing to have an open ear or be accepting about something.
I will only speak for NASA as its budget surpasses both CSA ($421.1 million) + ESA (6.9 Billion Euros) combined, which at the time of writing this is 22+ billion USD. That is a lot of money.
Why spend 22 Billion dollars on space when we have countless problems in the country and the planet that needs addressing?
Although that is a compelling argument, the truth is much complex than what the media portrays.
Compared to the overall budget of 2020, NASA’s budget costs only 0.48%. I can also say that why do we go into the deepest trenches of our ocean when we have enough problems on land? Answer: So that we can improve life on land by learning about the unknown.
NASA just doesn’t build rockets that go into space; it also deploys satellites that track and predict the weather, measure soil moisture levels that help farmers, helps to monitor and detect droughts, floods, etc.
NASA also detects incoming hazards to the earth like incoming asteroids and prepares for such circumstances. It sends rovers to Mars to learn about the sister planet and its environment so that someday we humans can become a multi-planetary species. NASA was also the inventor of GPS and Cameras. There are so many things NASA has built that we don’t know. NASA also employs more than 17,000 people at the time of writing, that is, many families.
And lastly, as Mark Rober said, “Imagination and Exploration.” We humans have always been explorers and dreamers. We have never been satisfied with what we have but always pushed the curtains to be more.
ISS or the International Space Station does cancer research that is hard to accomplish on earth. The 3D printers onboard the ISS build organs that are next to impossible to generate on earth due to the planet’s gravity but are built well in microgravity environments.
ISS carries out countless research and experiments onboard the ISS to help humans live in a much better world in the coming future.
Reference: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/international-space-station-astronauts-nasa/