From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.

The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.

NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.