To not understand why we can afford to send Tim Peake into space whilst we are cutting essential services for UK citizens?

[Destinysdaughter]

Just that really. I don't get it. Apparently we have no money for the NHS, police, care for the elderly etc but we can blow a shed load of money on this? Think the Gvt's priorities are skewed really badly. I have nothing against space exploration but surely basic needs should be met first? Or am I just naive...?

Why on earth is Mrs Ugg the Caveman make the new fangled round object when she has 14 children to look after? (or was 15 or 15.. Mrs Ugg hasn't yet invented counting) We have always dragged around our manmoth meat, why on earth does anyone want a wheel. What does mrs ugg think her family will do with that? What use could those hieroglytics be on that stone tablet when a sabre tooth tiger has just grabbed one of the kids. Never mind Mrs Ugg is pregnant again. Gawd help the junior Uggs if Mrs Ugg dies in childbirth or taken off by a sabre tooth tiger.

A beautiful picture you're painting!

Do people REALLY think that if the UK hadn't contributed the miserly sum of £60m to the ESA that the same amount would have been put back into the benefits budget?

No.

The point is that we are being lied to about the invented need for austerity.

Making life shit for non-rich people is an active choice that our country is making.

And luckily for those who want to make it there are a lot of very stupid and spiteful non-rich people who get such pleasure from watching other people suffer that they don't see how much they are losing out from living in a niggardly country that refuses to care properly for its most vulnerable.

We could afford to provide better services that would help our dulusabled and disadvantaged citizens live more pleasant, productive lives.

But we don't want to.

Adding a few pennies to the ESA makes people feel we are all modern and doing things for "progress".

But it's hard to see what "progress" we are making unless you think the early 19th century was the pinnacle of human achievement and we should back there except this time with rockets.

Keeping welfare spending as it is regardless of weather we can afford it or is is also ideological

Like someone says someone has to work so others can stay at home but to some the workers who sweat has been shed are just supposed to suck it up

Personally I am after glad that they now have mine clearing equipment and I would no issue explains to a disabled person that the voice activated wheelchair they use is a direct result of space travel

That Mrs Ugg analogy is irrelevant. The arguement is more nuanced than that. Its exactly about how we spend our resources it seems to me, rather than whether or not we should strive for progress. Of course we should!

The birth of the Internet was definitely a biproduct of CERN. Humans make discoveries and innervasions when we least expect it.

It wasn't long after the atom was split that we had nuclear energy. At the time it was achieved, no one was quite sure of a practical application for it all.