space funding is waste funding
I agree from the perspective of space exploration. But from a defense standpoint, it's arguably more important than a lot of things we consider traditional military spending on earth.
Our whole world would crumble instantaneously if the satellite infrastructure of America was sabatoged by an adversary. This is referring to communication satelites for cell carriers, weather satelites for fema, geopositioning satelites for gmaps, etc. This is even more important as we get closer to quantum computing , which will necessitate even more satelite communication due to QKD cyber security.
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It doesn't even need to be an adversary, even one of our domestic satlites could cause Kessler Syndrome if it went on the wrong trajectory, so you would have to have military infrastructure in space to shoot them down or physically bump them into a degenerate orbit.
en.m.wikipedia.org