There haven't been trillions of dollars spent on space—adding up all of NASA's budget since its inception in the 1950s through today and adjusting for today's dollars, it is on par with what the U.S. Department of Defense spends in a *single year.* And a lot of that money NASA spends goes directly back to Earth in the form of Earth observation satellites to monitor our changing planet (everything from weather to monitoring crops to prevent famine to tracking the spread of diseases), tens. of thousands of jobs, and drives technological development in aerospace, material science, and more. Remember, the first "A" in "NASA" stands for "aeronautics."