Space, The "when we get this mess cleaned up down here" frontier.

When I was a child, my mother and I would go to the public library all the time. She would head for the home improvement section (we were remodeling our house at the time) and I would run to the "outer space" section, or at least that’s what I called it at that age. Growing up my dad loved planes, trains and automobiles. I especially grew attached to the planes part. We went to air shows, airports, anywhere were I could sit and be mesmerized watching these huge pieces of metal fly effortlessly through the sky. Fueled by movies like “Star Wars” my fascination with planes would cross over to space. I thought space was the coolest thing and I really wanted to be an astronaut.
Now at age 29, I have a very different feeling about space and I ask this question. At what cost are we going to continue to fund a program that is a drain on our government spending, while our country rots from the inside out? We have to many issues, and not enough money to continue to fund a program that yes, has made advances in science, but has not advanced our health care, our economy, or taught children how to read. Tang tasted good when I was a kid, but $20,000 for a toilet to piss that stuff out into? As struggling as our society is we could really use these, plus the other classically overspent government funded projects that consist of such things like a special space hammer, or over engineered showers that break down constantly. We need to use these resources for books, health care, and our slumping economy. Most of our shuttle equipment isn't even made here; to save cost it's outsourced to foreign countries.
In today’s overpopulated world we need to focus our wealth on more important things. It's just not good enough in my eyes that we support this under funded program that we half-ass believe in-and continue to be satisfied with the meager advances it has made. I am all for exploring but we need to fix what is down here, before we explore up there.