> Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful

It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value.

For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!"

This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.

So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program.

It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program.

Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%.

Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%.

We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks.

Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it.

There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers.

That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.

> So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program.

What are these? If you say "integrated circuits" I'll point out that's largely a lie, unless by "space program" you mean "Minuteman II ICBMs".

"Comes from NASA" ends up meaning "NASA was tagentially involved early on". And really, how could it ever be concluded NASA was essential? You'd need to argue the counterfactual that a technology would not have been developed otherwise, and how can one do that?

We have ad-tech now I guess.