>>1
Do you think the side effect of inventing cool tech justifies spending money so people can see pretty pictures of stars?
Inventing cool tech creates industries, which makes the economy grow. The benefit to the economy far outweighs the money the government spends on space research. People often criticize the moon landing as being pointless; that's an absurd position, because the technological advancements we made and the number of jobs and industries we created returned orders of magnitude more tax dollars to the government than were spent on the project in the first place.
The point is, we don't need direct returns on government investments in space research to make it worthwhile. The overall economic benefit far outweighs the costs. The government should absolutely spend tax money on exploring space.