When you strip away the few half-hearted “practical” arguments space partisans offer (it turns out that the space program didn’t even give us TANG, by the way) you’re mostly left with sentimental piffle. Listening to some of them, I’m half-tempted to mount a First Amendment challenge to the space program as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. ~Gene Healy

I’m compelled to agree with Healy. On the whole, manned space flight as it has existed up until now is an inordinately expensive government project that yields next to nothing in return. Ever since it ceased to serve as a symbol of competition with the USSR, it can’t even be poorly justified by invoking major international rivalry. If it weren’t for all of the sentimentality, it is hard to see how the funding would have ever been approved for it.

Healy also has a column for The Washington Examiner that expands on this, which gives us this memorable line on Charles Krauthammer’s love affair with space flight:

Krauthammer’s obsession makes sense, in a way, since federally funded spaceflight is the quintessential neoconservative project: a giant, wasteful crusade designed to fill Americans’ supposedly empty lives with meaning.

Inasmuch as it tries to make people find meaning in and through the activities of the state, this makes government-run space flight into something of an idol.