There's just no way that we as a society when deciding between "some shiny new satellite thing produced by an American corporation" versus "the quality of the VLAs operations" will pick the latter.

It pains me to say it, but the average person does not know what the VLA is, nor care at all.

I am not an average person, but have not heard of the VLA before either ..

Anyway, evem when you rephrase it:

Do you want fast internet everywhere?

Or better conditions for science to maybe find aliens?

Not many people would vote for science. Which is economically understandable, so I am all for a moon observatory.

It's not just science to find aliens, radio astronomy answers so many questions that we might not even think to ask - and it is not cost feasible to do all of those observations from space. It's as if in the 18th century, you were like "do we want to spend more money on roads? or do we want to keep funding these stupid experiments that Edison is doing for science?"

No. I love space science, but knowing the origin of the universe will not bring us indoor lighting, refrigeration, clean energy, or anything like that. It is valuable in so far as it's worth some investment, but not so much it prevents us from providing global Internet.

Starlink is not going to solve last mile access problems except for a small number of people. Even rural areas have towns, and it's a matter of spending the money to bring Internet to them the way we did electricity.

You have no idea of what basic physics could learn from cosmology a priori, and neither do I.

Thanks!