Those jobs and money buy houses and put kids through college, despite not delivering astronauts safely.
Ultimately, it's what we collectively decided is more important.
Sounds like broken window fallacy to me. We pay for projects with the expectation that they will not provide value, but somebody gets paid. That’s the same as breaking windows across town so some people can get paid to fix them
The value they provide is continuous employment, research and development of technologies that have military applications, local industry development, and, eventually, space exploration.
This is why NASA has offices and hires manufacturing all over the country.