Learning more about the universe is one of the least stupid things we can do. The estimates for universal healthcare in the US range from $200 to $500 billion a year. Sure, we could reduce our research goals wherever (keeping in mind those may have an impact on healthcare, such as radiation and photography) or we could…not attack another country for no pressing reason (about $200 billion in a few weeks). But sure, let’s focus on the $25 billion a year spent on NASA. That will fix things.

There are so many different fields of research that have led to advances in just medicine, that you would be hard pressed to find one that hasn’t benefited it. Optics, electricity, refrigeration, metallurgy, chemistry, nuclear science, on and on. How many years do you think germ theory would have been delayed if Galileo hadn’t advanced optics to the point where telescopes could show details on planets?

I’m not celebrating billionaire expenditures either. NASA does science, though, and is not a billionaire. The Artemis missions aren’t a billionaire’s idea. They are the product of scientific curiosity, and in this ultracapitalist hellscape, science and research still costs money.

Now to be fair, the program cost $93bil…but over 13 years (plus an additional $4.3bil over four launches). By comparison, ICE got $85bil in just a year, and the US DoW budget (because it sure isn’t defense) is $175bil just for 2026; over 13 years, they’d be $1.1tril and $2.3tril, respectively. These missions are a drop in the bucket versus the kind of money they could be spending on science and social programs.

Could you spend $93+4bil on social programs? Absolutely. But I vote cutting the budgets of actively harmful departments first, whose budgets are 10-20x that of these scientific ones.