Yeah, all that waste creates jobs, and those jobs create more jobs.
And we wouldn't know quite how bad we were messing up the planet, let alone what we could do to curb it, if we didn't have all those oceanic and atmospheric satellites monitoring from above. That's a direct product of the space race. We learned about global warming first from Venus, and that's as dead as dead gets.
And we thought Mars was dead, too, but now it turns out there's water after all, a whole lot of it, and a very distinct possibility some of it could be liquid some of the time. We might not find Marvin, but what we learn could be a lot more useful.