Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.

Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.

Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.

Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.

to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.

Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.

(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)

But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.

And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)

So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.

Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.

A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.

> the resources are better used for other purposes

It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.

Now, the military...

It unites Americans towards a cause.

The engineering advancements have commercial applications.

And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.

Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.

With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."

Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis.

Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching?

And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc.

From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions.

The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war...