Why Space?

I sometimes wear my NASA t-shirt around Seattle and sooner or later I get the question, “Why are we spending money on space when we have so many problems on Earth?”

First of all, nobody seems to realize how much money NASA actually gets. NASA does so much with so little. If you were take the whole US Government’s Budget and represent it as a dollar bill, then NASA gets one half of a penny. For comparison, the US Defense Department gets twenty pennies or nearly 700 Billion (with a B) dollars. This means that non-NASA budget is 99.5 pennies in this comparison. Sounds like we have plenty of money but aren’t using it to address real problems.