> with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.

If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA

Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly launch people and things into space.

	▲	eru 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, NASA itself is a good counterexample here: NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't (have to) launch primates into space.

tikhonj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.