Is NASA worth government funding?

I've heard the argument that, in addition to space exploration technology, NASA has produced many other technologies that have applications on Earth, and therefore government funding for NASA is important. But if all of the money used to fund NASA were instead used to fund one or more research labs that were dedicated solely to finding solutions to problems on Earth, it seems to me that important problems facing humanity that NASA solved would likely have been solved significantly earlier than they have been and we would currently have solutions to major problems we are facing today. Is space exploration really more important than solving more problems on Earth?