And how many homeless and disadvantaged could be helped and/or rescued with the billions of dollars frittered away in space?
I wanted to share my perspective - unsolicited- as someone who works closely with poverty, refugees, etc. globally; because it is an important question.
When I take a broader perspective, I imagine our global budget: the one or two trillion that go into warfare, the billions that are accumulated as profits every year through extractives, pharma, and/or many unsustainable or ethically iffy businesses, billions spent on massively inefficient aid schemes that fritter away money in the 'last mile' to the disadvantaged, and so on. In this context, Space - an endeavor that mostly has brought about benefits to earth so far, tangible and intangible, is a drop in the global bucket...if we were to magically be able to reallocate resources: is it the right bucket to take from
first? Also there is a factor respecting the agency/freedom of those with resources,
who decides? I'd posit those spending in space industry are (on average) accelerating global welfare more than a lot of other ways of spending money.
Also, exploration (and the inevitable growth, in my opinion, of us as a civilization that will come with expanded time & space horizons), is in my mind, part of the global culture we must aspire to. Getting out of poverty is a means, but what is the end? Arts, personal growth, happier & healthier lives, spirituality, exploration...? the late Hans Rosling many years ago had a good wrap up of a talk on this matter:
New insights on poverty. (see min 14)
While I worked supporting NGOs in SE Asia I flew High-Altitude Balloons (the helium balloons with camera that go to 110k feet) as a program with kids in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar. Each launch was a few hundred bucks and the stuff was executed by the children with adult support (each launch entailed many logistical and regulatory conundrums). True, those $ would have floated a family or two out of desperate poverty for a few months, maybe. But we inspired hundreds of boys and girls to reach out, push their perceptions about their limits, meet like minded doers, and be unafraid to push forward. These days we need all the reminders we can of what we can do as a species when we're at our best.
Hope you find this useful as you find your answers to your questions
/sorry for the offtopic, feel free to move but I think this 'nagging feeling' from Chet is a valid one, that deserves introspection to delve into the topic with integrity.