[csallen]

Space exploration isn't all about side-effects.

Humanity cannot survive on the Earth for eternity. Eventually we will have to move on to other habitable worlds. Doing so is an almost unimaginably difficult engineering task. This reason alone is sufficient to justify space exploration in my mind.

On a shorter time scale, there are massive amounts of resources in space that, with better technology, we could theoretically harvest for our use here on Earth. Once again, this is incredibly difficult to accomplish and won't happen without learning from experiments.

In the present, satellites are extremely beneficial to humanity, and factor into our everyday lives. In addition, space telescopes and space stations facilitate research that couldn't be done on Earth.

[ommunist]

Yeah, m8. With Musk to Mars!