Does NASA Justify Its Costs to the Taxpayer?

NASA and their national space exploration program is one of the biggest areas of federal spending in the country today, even though there have consistently been very little results that have ever benefited mankind as a whole. I personally cannot think of a single thing that the space program has provided that has really impacted on certainly my life, or even in a peripheral way that i personally might just not have encountered yet.

Until our technology actually allows us to explore space rather then just relatively short distance expeditions that don't really teach us that much for what they are costing, i believe the space program should be shut down altogether, allowing the government to attend to more pressing matters such as global terrorism or the social and economic decline in many cities of the unites states today. As it stands today our aspirations of space travel far outweigh our actual ability in terms of what we can realistically achieve.

Many people have an idea in their heads of space travel and exploration as being like something from star trek or the countless alien or UFO films, rather then the reality which is that we are literally hundreds of years from anything like this level of capability and technology. When technology has caught up to our imaginations i see no problems with spending the kind of money necessary to explore space and other planets when it will actually start to benefit people, however this is still a very long way off.

The only areas that NASA hes actually improved technology itself is in areas directly applicable to itself. Obviously in the areas of rocket propulsion and space technology they have made improvements, but only really very slight ones that haven't helped the world or even the citizens of this country in itself, or improved their lives in any way. Back in the 60s and 70s the idea of space exploration and seeing how far we could go as a race was an exciting prospect, however over the last 40 years there haven't been enough improvements to justify the amount of public money that has been wasted on NASA.