I imagine designing and building space craft and paying top scientists a wage costs A LOT of money.
So do government programs make money or does it just use up tax dollars without much return?
Also how does a company like SpaceX, for example, make their money?
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NASA provides massive indirect boosts to the economy. They don’t make money through direct sales of anything. From a purely economic standpoint, NASA’s benefit is in pioneering entirely new industries. Their data and research goes to the public domain for a reason.
You can just take SpaceX as an example. SpaceX would not exist if it were not for NASA. NASA was responsible for shoving enough money in their direction to build the Falcon 9 rockets. Without NASA, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt years ago. SpaceX also draws most of their engineers from NASA. In fact, that brain drain has been a huge contributing factor to recent issues at JPL and their delays in recent projects.
Another example was the Apollo program which by itself supported huge amounts of high tech industries. For several years NASA basically bought the majority of transistors made, giving a huge boost to the advancement and adoption of transistors and computing technology.
And that’s to say nothing about what NASA has done for the aeronautical space. Passenger jets rely on a huge amount of technology and advancements that NASA drove. Be they high efficiency jet engines or wing designs or the testing/design capabilities that Boeing relies on. Pretty much all of them were pioneered by NASA and taken up by the private industry later on.
This is what people mean when they say that NASA generates massive returns on investment. Government spending on NASA ultimately drives private industry by pioneering new and risky technology and providing the knowledge gained to the public. As a result, we get numerous multi-billion dollar industries that employ a lot of skilled workers. And all of these pay taxes to the government.
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