> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene

Why? According to Wikipedia they spend like $1.4b annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO That's like an extra $10 for each of these citizens living in "extreme poverty".

And what's the cutoff? Like 10% of the US population is under the poverty line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States. Is NASA "obscene" too? Granted that's not the same as "extreme poverty" but it's still a bad look in the richest country in the world, right?

> unless it provides significant economic value

Investments in science and technology generally do. Rich countries are advanced in science and technology.