Research and Development funding often results in a valuable--not necessarily, but often also monetary--upside. Something as simple as the firmware update, which allows hardware to receive updates to reprogrammable chips similar to how software can be patched, was developed by NASA and makes everything from smartphones to medical equipment more dependable and cheaper to maintain for their entire working life.

There are innumerable simple-yet-powerful ideas that have come out of public funding for the sciences. Funding for planetary science, the grandaddy and most demanding of them all, should not be cut. It is not an optional expenditure for the commons. It is a necessary investment into something that can ironically both protect us from foreign aggressors and perhaps eventually make such an idea obsolete.