I'm not an economist, but many that I have read or seen have said that all the money used to support the financial institutions and companies kept this country from falling in to a very deep depression. Not a whole lot of space exploration would come from a depression.

I don't believe that "seven times" estimate. Evidently a whole lot of people don't either. Especially with regard to money spent on Human Space flight. And if someone can really "see the future", well he would be more amazing then anything else. Everyone takes their best guess at what will work the best. And I really don't see how increasing NASA's budget with a direction to work the problem another way is "pandering to minority voters" or "selling out the future".

The current administration was left so many problems from the previous 8 years that very little is going to be solved overnight.