NASA is excellent at its job. You just have to accept the fact that in 1969, NASA's job was putting astronauts on the moon, and in 2024 NASA's job is distributing taxpayer money to various places that don't deserve it. They're damn good at their job.
From what I can gather, they largely distribute money to lots of places in the USA, thereby pouring money into regions that wouldn’t have it otherwise, creating jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and raise the baseline income overall. If anything, this should have a beneficial effect where more people can spend more, don’t require social services, slide into drug abuse or homelessness. Some part of the government has to do that; but instead of just handing the money out to poor people, they do it indirectly and keep folk in active employment. What would be bad about that?
This is a dangerous path (assuming it is the case, I don't know about NASA internals). If you want to improve people's living or help them; just do that and help them by putting money in their bank accounts no strings attached.
Most governments of the world would disagree with you here; wealth redistribution programmes are a normal and proven way to organise a state. You can help people in a multitudes of ways, and just handing them out money is not always the best option—people also need maintained infrastructure, schools, entertainment, parks, municipal services, and so on; and they usually also need purpose, which many people derive from their jobs. So having a large employer, or a project that builds on many contractors that employee people, is a good way to distribute wealth and achieve something beneficial in the process, like GPS satellites, space science, or just plain power display to other nations. All the people that are employed in the process pay taxes, care about their neighbourhoods, send their kids to universities, go shopping, and keep the economy alive.
I'm not to say this is the only true answer, other approaches exist, like the (so far unproven) unconditional basic income, or just social security services. But I would definitely argue that it has positive effects for an economy to keep people busy, to give them purpose and secure jobs.
Edit: Having said all that, of course I'm neither an authority on NASA internals here, but the strategy would make sense and definitely is applied in other areas and countries, too.
another important role of NASA is to demonstrate that government agencies waste money, its like the USPS or the NBN in Australia, its liberals putting other liberals in charge of these projects so liberals can say "look private space flight is way more efficient!". It is not allowed to be a functional agency for ideological reasons.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday that NASA administrator Charles Bolden was wrong to say that reaching out to the Muslim world was a top priority of the U.S. space agency.
Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling Al-Jazeera television recently President Barack Obama had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Muslim world.
He said Obama told him one of his top priorities was to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Improving relations with the Muslim world was a top foreign policy priority for Obama on taking office last year and he delivered a major speech on the topic in Cairo in June 2009.
The White House last week sought to clarify Bolden's comment, saying Obama wanted NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and engineers from countries like Russia and Japan, Israel and many Muslim-majority countries.
That failed to end the controversy.
Gibbs, at his daily news briefing, was asked why Bolden had made the comment.
"It's an excellent question, and I don't think -- that was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said.
Many in the U.S. space community, such as moon astronaut Neil Armstrong, are disgruntled by Obama's proposals to bolster support for private space companies and abandon an over-budget NASA moon program.
