Not sure whats your problem, why can't we have both?
Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.
These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.
> Not sure whats your problem, why can't we have both?
Because resources are limited? Any money going to, say, SLS is money that can't go to another project. This would be true even if NASA's budget were 10x bigger.
I'm not sure what it is about NASA that leads people to pretending that we have infinite budgets. In just about any other area, we can have a discussion about whether or not this is a good allocation of resources (for instance, the Human Brain Project I mentioned before). But when NASA comes up, this goes out the window and we're supposed to believe projects like the SLS are tantamount to being free, and that they aren't diverting resources from other potential NASA projects.
Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.
These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.