It’s also true that even as VP, the space program was Johnson’s “baby.” He is why Mission Control is in Texas, even though the rockets are launched from Florida.
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Even more technically, we never declared war on the DPRK. That was a police action. Indeed the US hasn’t declared war on anybody since 1942. But we sure have had plenty of armed conflcts.
Couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork?
Integrated circuits were invented before the Apollo mission was first conceived and its main advances (like self-aligned gates) were done independently of anything being done for Apollo.
What you are saying is true for a subset of really, really expensive things. And building (and repairing) infrastructure is really important too.
However, the space program isn’t one of those things. The money spent on this will go primarily to labor, such as the design work of the spacecraft and the design work on the parts and the design work for the parts of the parts. It will go to the machinist who makes the parts, and the machinist who makes the parts needed to make the parts. It will go to the people who do the testing. It will go to the people who handle the paperwork and the accounting and the HR for the people who are doing this.
The raw materials to make the spacecraft are fairly cheap, it’s the labor to turn those raw materials into a spacecraft that costs so much. And that labor will be done almost exclusively by people in the 99%, from the person who monitors the titanium alloy mix to the person who makes the wire to the person who bolts the tanks together to the person who writes the code to make the computers work to the person who… well, you get the idea.
Yes, there will be some profit overhead. Some of the money (not much) will go to the corporate coffers of contracting companies who complete the cacophony of construction. But that is true of anything; a company without profit won’t be able to secure funds in the future to continue. And the profit percentage is about the same for infrastructure as for NASA work.
On the front side, this is a lot more like infrastructure than you’d think. Perhaps not as much return on the backside, although it has better return than military spend, and occupies the same groups of people.
Now, spending a ton of money on a painting from a long-dead artist is the kind of expensive thing that doesn’t do jack for the velocity of money; it’s just a transfer of funds from one wealthy person to another. Buying anything that is jewel-encrusted is similar; and the economic velocity of a Lamborghini is lower than the economic velocity of a F150 pickup truck because more of the money is corporate profit. Anything to do with exploiting the blockchain and bitcoin synergies to enhance customer awareness and enable new revenue streams while providing new standards of security and consumer confidence is a complete con game.
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