Jeff Brooks reprises the old arguments about relative cost and value of government programs, and whether we can afford funding for NASA, and proposes that we increase it. Well, of course we could easily afford to spend twice, or three times, or ten times as much money on NASA. We’re a very wealthy country.

But the real point is not whether the money we spend on NASA is worth it relative to other agencies, but whether or not we’re getting good value for the money. I’d argue that, if the goal is to have a robust, space-faring society, that we’ve gotten very poor value for the money to date, and simply spending more money doing the wrong things (usually because of porkified pressure from the Congress) would make matters worse, not better.

Until space actually becomes important as a goal in itself, it doesn’t matter how much money gets thrown at it. And if it were, then we could probably achieve most of what we want with the available funding, as long as it were spent more intelligently toward that goal.