You forget the unspoken assumption, which is that “suffering” is a valid excuse for being a complete and total dick to other people. (But only for dudes, of course.)

If it were up to me, I’d definitely redirect most of that funding towards robotic missions while leaving part of it for commercial space development stuff (i.e. see if we can actually get the cost of getting humans into space down). But the crewed space program appears to help keep the funding levels NASA needs up in…