Just a sample of technological advances from the space program.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/tec.../spinoffs.html
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54862main_benefits.pdf

The money's a drop in the bucket, at least for now: an increase of $1 billion over the next five years. The rest will come from rejiggering priorities at NASA. It's high time to ground the space shuttle. A Palm Pilot literally has more computing power and the thing's a death-trap, as we saw last year. Anyway, at $15.5 billion annually for all of NASA, the agency gets less than one percent of the overall $2.2 trillion federal budget. It's not a big-ticket item like social security ($493 billion), defense ($390 billion) and Medicare ($255 billion).

If you want to make the (very valid) argument that there are more pressing needs for federal dollars, you're picking a fight with the wrong agency. NASA's chump change.

I could not agree more.

Howard Dean or Gen. Clarke will need that money to pay off "W's" black hole he's gotten us in.

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the space shuttle disaster was a result of NASA's overly bureaucratic mgmt and launch first attytood. agreed the shutle sneed to eb scrapped...I'm not sure how many things they develop relative to the same amount being used at private research firms (Return on Investment). and quite frankly, i'm not interested enough to research it. you are right, we shoudl cut those other three programs and leave NASA alone.

My personal opinion, but I think that this is one of the few areas where our tax dollars are not wasted. I would much rather see money spent here then on many of the other programs that it is wasted on. The ROI from a technology, industry and academic standpoint outperform that of almost any other government funded program.