He is sort of right, Whats the point in the short term spending money when Earth is still a mess? Are we going to find something on the moon or mars or in our solar system that will change everything? Do we not already know about all the different materials in space and in the universe?
So i would rather Earth was sorted first before we pollute it to the point where we are probably better off on Mars. We are still infants on our own planet and putting a few people on Mars will solve nothing at all. We have billions of years to escape the ticking time bomb called the sun. That for me is probably the main reason to get out of town.
if you take that sort of attitude, why bother with space exploration (including such things we take for granted as satellites), at all.
One of the key things about space exploration is that it tends to drive research into materials and the sciences in general, which has a massive affect on things on the planet.
You could say why are the third world governments bothering with things like mobile phone and internet infrastructure as they've got people starrving, except that "high tech" and seemingly useless under the conditions tech is being used to drive education, both at the general level, and at the targeted level with things like farming and healthcare/family planning being taught using the tech.
Increasingly the photovoltaic cells developed for bigger, better, more capable satellites are being used to help provide basic power in large parts of the world.
Something as simple as a small light powered by a rechargeable battery* that is recharged by a solar panel assists in allowing people to learn in the evening, and NASA was conducting experiments with an early TV broadcast satellite in the 70's to put TV with educational programming into towns and villages in the backwoods of India.
If we waited for the worlds problems to be sorted we'd never get round to space exploration, not least because there will almost certainly always be problems that the money could be spent on, but space exploration has a huge number of side benefits for everything from entertainment and education, to locating and warning people of dangers, weather forecasting these days relies very heavily on satellites for advance warning of incoming weather, which helps protect people from extreme weather conditions, and possibly more importantly help farmers know when it's the best time to harvest their crops or pull their herds in.
*From memory the space programmes have pushed that technology massively, as reliable, lightweight power sources are a necessity in space travel (and rather funnily mobile phones have pushed it more recently, along with things like efficient, small motors).
