Why wait for spinoffs? (Score 1)

If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo... NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds

ok, so some useful inventions have come out as unexpected side-effects of the Apollo program. But why throw money at manned spaceflight and hope some spinoffs result by accident? Wouldn't it be much more productive to spend the money directly on the problems we want to solve?

Spending billions on Apollo II could help us solve climate change - or it could give us some more fasteners and powdered drinks. Why not spend billions on developing better wind/solar/nuclear/etc?