re: Historical examples
When NASA's SETI program was cancelled in 1993, thanks in large part to Senator Byron (Bryan?) of Nevada, someone calculated that it saved the national deficit by all of 0.0001 percent.
As reported in Time magazine in 1980, what HUD spent in just 4 months NASA spent in the first TWENTY YEARS of its existence.
And how about the 1995 study of financial waste at the Pentagon, which ended up costing the taxpayers $60 BILLION (insert irony here).
And think how much money was spent just this weekend by people going to see a fictional portrayl of life and travel in space that could have gone towards the real thing, with much better acting to boot!