[theptip]

The ROI of NASA is extremely high:

> For every dollar invested by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.

https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/ (more reading: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/library/find/bibliographies/...)

This suggests that we're under-investing in NASA, since the ROI of the marginal government dollar is surely nowhere near that high. Basically to first approximation, we should start at the bottom of "ROI per marginal dollar" in the federal budget and reallocate those dollars into NASA and other basic research. I suspect agricultural subsidies and military spending are two places where you will find extremely low ROI at the margins.

(In other words I don't think we should be trading off between "big" vs. "small" science.)