China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.

The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.

Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.

edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.