> You point out that "poverty/hunger/education..." have improved despite Space.

I did no such thing.

I'm saying that you can't wait to solve all problems before you take on space exploration. They are not mutually exclusive. One can do space exploration while simultaneously working to alleviate poverty/hunger/illiteracy/etc. The example of the US in 1961 was meant to illustrate that: the US was fighting a war in Vietnam, a massive Civil Rights movement at home, and still managed to put a man on the moon.

Fair enough.

All nations have budgets for a multitude of programs and can work simultaneously on different goals.

Obviously, they all draw from a single ressource, money, and therefore priorties have to be weighted carefully.

Overall I'm not getting many good arguments on how to handle this except "Why, things have improved, haven't they? Give me Star Trek" and "Bigots!".

I suspect that this is because Space fans are on average less affected by the above mentioned acute problems, more likely to benefit professionally from investment in space programs, and generally appreciate the nature of space missions: A difficult task, but with a clear solution through engineering.

You're making strawman arguments. I'm no space fan; I'm just a fan of science and tech. I believe that a country the size of India can multitask: it can work on alleviating poverty/hunger/etc. while at the same time spending a little bit on space exploration. In fact, name any space-exploring country, and I can point out some social ill that money could be solving.