they say that our countries defense is more important over NASA and education, but that doesn't really make sense to me.
It's not just our country, though. Like President Obama once said, nobody calls London or Beijing when there's a crisis somewhere in the world.
It's sort of our place in the world that we inherited from the older generation that was in political power during and immediately after WW2, which over the course of their life time the world be completely transformed and just tear itself apart time over and over.
For a long time, we've been the most capable nation to economically support others, the moral leader of the world, (the "shining city on the hill", like President Reagan once said) and the largest contributor of foreign aid.
Sure, sometimes the things we do with the Defense budget is really really really bad (e.g. funding the Chilean revolution in the '70s under the Nixon administration), but we get it right way more often than we get it wrong (e.g. saving the French economy from collapse, rebuilding the UK's infrastructure; saving the Chinese when the Yangtze River flooded; defeating Communism; and establishing the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to bring ladders of opportunity to the former Third World and create a sort of referee for the entire world's economy).
All of these things that we do costs a lot of money and even though a lot of that money can sometimes arguably go to waste due to rent seekers or fraudsters, the bottom line is that it's the price we all pay for the almost century of relative world peace and stability that we've seen.
We can disagree about exactly what proportion each of the States' budgets should go toward their own education systems (because, per the 10th amendment, education is not Washington's responsibility) or exactly how much we should spend on space exploration, but at the end of the day ensuring relative world peace and stability for future generations is far more important in the big picture.
In so many words: it's actually very believable and not ridiculous.