Luckily for all you cynics, NASA has a page made just for you! Just go to https://spinoff.nasa.gov and marvel at the literally thousands of technologies that have filtered down to society for a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Hydro/aeroponics, artificial limbs, roads, baby formula, firefighter gear, airplanes, cordless vacuums, water purification, solar cells, GPS, and simulation software is but a tiny list of the things made possible or greatly improved by NASA research and funding.

No other organization on this planet has done more to bring different scientists together with ample funding and an inspirational mandate. Biologists, physicist, material scientists, engineers, and even sociologists have come together under one roof resulting in a dizzying list of technologies that would have taken much longer to hit the market or never made at all. NASA is a multidisciplinary research and technology powerhouse unrivaled in human history. Space is just what brought everyone together.

But maybe I'm biased ;)

But would NASA out-perform a research university with the same budget, tasked with addressing the aforementioned problem/solutions directly rather than incidentally?

Yes. NASA is drastically different from an academic institution and the difference in administrative culture alone allows it to be a more effective multidisciplinary research organization working on everything from pure science to industrial ready technologies. For example, Black and Decker developed the first cordless vacuum after their engineers got an idea while working on cordless drills with NASA in the same research center where they were working on Apollo 11+ and photovoltaics. Universities are simply not made for this purpose, since they focus on basic research and education.

Furthermore, much of NASA's success is due to the mix of scientists from different fields, universities, and business working on one problem. When the best of the best come together, it results in a cross polinatiom of ideas. It's not just being in the same building or sharing a cafeteria while working on disparate grants, but a day to day sharing of knowledge to tackle a single problem.

This is a really well-informed comment and I wanted to say something else in support of it.

A Caltech scientist who had worked with DOE and NASA labs made an offhand comment about the kind of work that those labs are suited to do that stuck with me - he said they should be trying to solve problems that are "national lab hard" - kind of a play on NP-hard.

What he meant is that these environments are suited to solving complex cross-discipline engineering/science problems ("make the right measurements to understand the climate system", or "find the processes and materials to make air travel safer", or "put a huge infrared telescope in space").

These are not problems that are suited to a university research structure. They don't get solved with $300K/year grants, small collections of discipline-focused PIs, and transient grad students.

Think of how many prerequisite advancements are needed for deploying GPS. Now task a team with developing only GPS but not anything that might enable safer launches or better solar cells in space. They eventually develop a GPS solution but in order for it to be as good as what we got they would need to be part of a group full of interdisciplinary teams that would look allot like NASA.

Or if you prefer a programming analogy, what if all software teams only built what they were explicitly tasked for and could not collaborate on the tools used. Managers _might_ get their deliverables faster but I suspect by not developing tools incidentally we leave out future productivity gains.

Nasa doesn't have publish-or-perish.

> We've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust.

We sent boats into the Atlantic, it turns out it's just water. Guess there's no point looking any farther.

Yes, I think the same about deep sea exploration.

Ya, because who needs to know about exotic microbes living in extreme conditions at the bottom of the ocean. /s

It's almost certainly irrelevant for our survival, but it's also not expensive enough for me to care.

Investments in space programs are investments in sustainability, global cooperation. Knowing how to seal a person in a box for months tells us what a human actually consumes. working together on joint scientific ventures brings foriegn peoples closer. This leaves out all the other cool inventions like GPS that space travel has enable thus far that improve are ability to do everything better.

This is just a repackaging of the purely economic investment observation of space programs. The government spending dollars on space has resulted in a many more dollars (or the same dollar spent many more times) on related economic interests. For example: Improved ways to track weather lead to reduced costs of flights, lead to more airline tickets purchased, lead to more travel, lead to more business trips leads to business happening.

Each step in the thread of such and example the effect gets smaller but because there are so many hard problems and so much science gets done that there are many threads.

I used to have a bicycle that I rode to work that was made using an aluminum foam that NASA developed and licensed out to companies that wanted to make light but stiff metal frames. In this case Fuji a Japanese company making racing bikes. Without it for that 3 year period I didn't have a license I would not have had job.

> Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but space exploration strikes me as a waste of money and energy.

Yes, because the "defense" budget is a much better use of resources. The NASA budget is a rounding error in comparison.

There is enough money. Money dedicated to space exploration is well spent.

> We know enough about space for now

Says who? Perhaps you need to do some more research.

> There is enough money. Money dedicated to space exploration is well spent.

How do you figure? We have plenty to research on earth for a fraction the cost. What makes you say space exploration will give a better return?

Have you read this letter of note?

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

I'm a researcher who works on fighting antimicrobial resistant bacteria.

The reason I got into science is because space is cool. Also, we've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust...and maybe water.

What happened to Venus is a pretty good motivator for sustainability and limiting global warming, no?

How about the Earth-observing satellites that are monitoring key environmental variables (http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov), or the exoplanet spectroscopy studies that will see how common different atmospheres are (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/) ?

Those pesky observations are why planetary science funding got cut.

It turns out that one really good way to solve issues like sustainability is to set a bunch of really smart folks about the difficult task of creating a sustainable ecosystem without any outside help (e.g. an atmosphere). The payoff is a set of technologies, tools, and experiences that can be used in more abundant ecosystems (e.g. planet-side). This "spinoff" effect is very well understood and documented.

Are you suggesting that we should just stay here, forever?

Our curious nature has always led us to explore the next frontier, historically speaking.