No other country except USA can afford those programs. It should be a matter of pride for Americans.

The space shuttle has been a very successful program. A combination of the shuttle itself being very versitle and having a crew of seven astronauts resulted in a very flexible program. The space shuttle mission capability: Heavy lift (~25,000 lbs to LEO), Spacelab (scientific labatory), satellite repair and/or retrieval, Mir servicing, ISS assembly and resupply. I'll say the shuttle is worth the cost to the tax payers. The ISS on the other hand hasn't been a complete success story. By the time it is completed it would have cost ~100 billion and the science coming from the ISS hasn't been all that stallar. The space station shouldn't have been much more complex than skylab. Alot of NASA old timers who were a part of Apollo would argue that NASA should have stuck with the Apollo architecture and continued with the moon missions and Skylab type LEO missions. As flexible as the space shuttle was the Apollo system was more so. Was your question about whether NASA spends their money well? Or was it more like should the Federal Government really fund NASA missions? I think peaceful progress is always worth it. The technological spin offs and flow down from NASA programs to more 'earthly' uses is well documented. Concerning the question of whether the money should be spent on helping the poor and sick: NASA's annual budget is ~18 billion and money Americans donate annually to charity is ~ 300 billion. And this excludes money coming from the world's governments to support these causes. Yes, billions of dollars is billions of dollars. But if 300+ billion is far from enough to solve the world's problems I am not sure another 10+ billion will make that much of difference. Hard to beleive but that appears to be the case.

Yes. If we're ever to truly explore the stars it has to start somewhere.

Not yet but that's why its considered an investment. Was it worth it for queen Isabella to finance Christopher Columbus before his journey?