I have not read the thread at all. Just answering the thread title's question.

No.

(There ya go. No need to thank me. It was an easy and obvious answer. Glad to be of help.)

It does and it is mainly because they let so much politics get into their function not to mention DOD money and influence. That said, the Hubble space telescope has returned knowledge that is beyond price and rewrote all the textbooks I studied in school. So we wasted a ton of money but did get some good return in a few specific places that was a good value at any cost.

NASA got in deep sauce back in the 80's. problem was, we needed to keep the shuttles flying frequently so that we had a vehicle to build the space base defense systems..... and they had to keep coming up with legitimate civilian reasons to keep spending all the money. The next giant sinkhole was the space station which, again, was an essential framework from which space based defense platforms could be built, deployed and maintained. So the mars program suddenly appeared.

As I said, some of the greatest gains in human knowledge have come courtesy of NASA's work so I dispute any claim the money was wasted.... but at the same time, they lack oversight and have burned money by the trillions on things that clearly are not worth the cost (like going to mars IMHO).

I think we should have a space program but a little more transparency and fiscal restraint would be a nice change.

Then why are you having the meeting?

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

I'm damn frugal and fiscally conservative, but I think it important to point out that NASA's budget is about 0.6% of the entire Federal budget in FY2016.

I know $19 billion isn't chump change and we could use cuts everywhere across the board, and a much less powerful FedGov...

But NASA isn't exactly the largest thing breaking the bank. Not even close, by a very long shot.

And while the various missions have at times been of dubious value, many of the things learned are in trades and craftwork and manufacturing skills that we're not doing so well at anymore. An example was welding aluminum. Pre-Apollo, folks just didn't even know how to make long accurate welds in thin aluminum. It was a significant problem for most of the program and craftsmen simply learned and got better at it. Much much better.

Shuttle was a disaster of planning and a boondoggle of mixed missions that doomed the project from Day One, but the complexity and systems integration knowledge learned is second to none. We wouldn't have many of our current crop of amazing aerospace systems if it weren't for Shuttle pushing those engineering boundaries.

All of the program's pushed materials engineering to its limits. Even the venerable "Reinforced Carbon-Carbon" wing leading edges that ultimately doomed Columbia and her crew were an almost unheard of use of materials at the time of initial design, and massive amounts of work went into both creating and certifying these types of things for manned space flight. (Unfortunately when you fire large chunks of insulation foam at RCC panel material at supersonic speeds, they shatter. Too bad that air cannon test wasn't done sooner. Many engineering people involved simply stood with their mouth open in shock and sadness when they realized what they had just seen.)

In all, while our space program may often have been misguided or driven by strange goals at times, it really does push many engineering efforts to the very limits of knowledge, and the information learned for the most part is freely available to the public, including business who don't have massive R&D staff to accomplish similar design, build, test, and certification goals.

If absolutely nothing else, the Shuttle fatalities and two accidents, have given wicked good examples of how to cut the red tape and investigate two significant accidents. The results have shown that certain management styles can be fatal.

And let's not forget an intangible. Hope. So many people stuck in drudgery and dead end jobs could always watch and see what NASA was up to, maybe have a few astronauts as their heroes, and wish they could go to space and see the earth from that vantage point, or the moon... Unmanned probes are safer, more cost effective, and better in nearly every way except one thing...

Knowing people are "up there" as you catch a glimpse of Shuttle or ISS (or both chasing one another after undocking or just prior to docking) zooming across the sky, just visible to the naked eye. It's sobering, and was something we could almost all be intensely proud of our country and its accomplishments.

Manned space flight is never routine (as much as NASA claimed it was) but as a source of heroes and heroines, It's second to none.

How many people did any one flight trigger a desire to decide that aerospace engineering was the thing they wanted to do for a living.

It's a pretty good way to see the practical application.

I wonder if upper management trying to follow disjointed administration directives may or may not have resulted in a lack of solid direction since Kennedy challenged them to reach the moon by the end of the decade. Those days of unlimited funding was a hard habit to break.

Because of NASA, we can look at what China, Russia, North Korea, ISIL, and plenty of others are up to. Is it a waste of money? How about starting just with the successful retaliation attacks in the war on terrorists that have happened because of the technology we have in orbit?

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Geoff. Since 1960.

No NASA, then you'd never have seen these:

Top 10 Hubble Photos - Photo Gallery - National Geographic Magazine

As Rick Blaine said:

"I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that and give NASA enough money to do more research like this. This is what science is all about."

NASA is the spirit of human curiosity and exploration. What if Columbus's exploratory voyages had never been funded. Or Magellan or da Gama. Yes, NASA is good thing.

If not for Ponce de Leon, we would not have the fountain of youth.

If your investment budget does not have at least 1% "gambling money" you will never realize great gains. That is what NASA is to me, and I would prefer it to spending on almost all social programs.

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Front sight and squeeze

No, it is not a waste of money. It keeps my nerdy, engineer neighbors employed and not talking to me about their over-engineered pinewood derby cars or birdhouses with digital cameras so the kids can watch the baby birds grow up - and has a lot of science courses for local kids.

Anything that makes life easier and more productive is a keeper.
In my own industry (Court Reporting), our biggest advance, real-time (what we use for closed captioning for the hearing impaired), was dreamt up by the CIA.
The computers we all use came out of the space program.
New and better materials and alloys have come from the space program.

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and what his trumpet saith

Living so close to Houston, I'm at a loss as to why the current administration loathes NASA. As others have said, it's an immense source of pride for Americans and the USA.

I'm always a bit perturbed when I hear of American astronauts having to get a "lift" to and from the ISS from the Russians. We could be using our own gear and expanding our own tech all the while providing more jobs to more Americans. As a kid, what was cooler than NASA in action?

Does NASA waste money? Absolutely.
They are a government agency and like any other government agency, they're bogged down with red tape, endless paperwork, idiot bureaucrats, playing politics and all the other baggage that goes along with any federal agency.
There's little doubt that NASA could definitely use some restructuring and redirecting.

Is NASA a waste of money? Absolutely NOT!
Aside from all the good things already mentioned, the ultimate future of mankind lies somewhere out there among the stars. While it may not happen for several centuries yet, I truly believe that at some point in the future, for whatever reason, that the survival of the human race will depend on our ability to bail off of this ball and colonize other planets.
It sure would be helpful if we had someplace to go and the means to get there.