It really isn't a good filter for anything except "makes money quickly". Plenty of science returns zero economic benefits for years, even decades, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
How do you figure? We stand in a nation built on giant economic long shots and in the only one that managed to put humans on the moon in a joint government commercial venture.
I'm using an open source product to write this to you. Running on an open source operating system. Also on an open source hardware device. Where's the "quick money" in any of this?
> but that doesn't mean it's useless.
It doesn't mean it's useful either. You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.
Where's the capitalism in open source? Yes, yes, Red Hat, Microsoft etc all have their hands in it, but the very idea is anticapitalist.
>You can't use a simple "expectation factor" divorced from all other reality to decide how to spend tax money.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but plenty of countries outside the US spend money on things without tangible economic benefit.
America wins for a reason in geopolitical history and it's because it has a secret military on top of its apparent military. Air forces and scientists are just fungible tokens for a surreptitious right wing shadow government that competes with ankle biting bugs like neo-Marxists. But it can all be reduced to undignified gang banging like Crips and Bloods, because space colonization isn't as noble as the romantic fictions have showed it to be. Maybe the correct inference from knowledge of history is that humanity isn't the end goal to chase after?