Blazing Saddles would be called dated and “done before.”
It was originally made as a way to laugh at Westerns, which, up to that point, had dominated the market. A lot of the tropes and plot lines the movie rips on are explicitly there because they were usually in these “safe” Westerns.
Scientific advancement in space experimentation leads to breakthroughs in other areas - all scientific progress is interconnected.
“Pushing science towards solving the most immediate and important problems” is sort of a nonsense statement, as there could be new efficiencies/strategies that are discovered in fields that are completely unrelated to what would normally be associated with “the most immediate and important problems.”