Reply #21: I agree that the quest for knowledge is not linear

[caraher]

However, I also know that, for the amount of funding devoted to developing a not-so-reliable space truck, we could have funded thousands of projects that would have resulted in far more peer-reviewed science than will ever come out of ISS and Shuttle (not counting robotic instruments like Hubble that simply happened to be delivered by Shuttles but could more cheaply have been delivered by expendable rockets).

I guess there are two kinds of choices we're talking about here, both of which have serious political constraints. I'm imagining we spend $X on science; how do we split it between manned space flight and other science? By virtually any clear measure, the scientific return manned space flight has been essentially negligible in the Shuttle era. (This is why it gets sold as adventure, exploration and romance - only these intangibles can possibly justify an effort whose chief scientific product doesn't go much beyond looking at survival in near-Earth orbit.) But in a way that choice doesn't exist, because realistically subtracting manned spaceflight will never leave $X for science but rather $X minus the cost of sending astronauts into space.

But the other kind of choice you seem to be talking about is equally unrealistic, in that we could spend $X on bombs + science, but politically we're very far from a condition where a dollar not spent on bombs will go to basic research (these days, of course, it will go to pay for tax breaks for billionaires).

Maybe ferrying astronauts is a more satisfying way to waste money than many of the alternatives (more bombs, more cash for fat cats). But the program has killed 14 astronauts and produced precious little science, and ended with no clear direction for what comes next. It was sold as a cheap "space truck" but proved anything but cheap - and the whole premise of the program was that what space science needed to blossom was a cheap ride into space. I'm less convinced that's true than I was when I was a teen and the shuttle program was getting underway, but either way it's fallen far short of what was promised - and what needed to be achieved to justify the expense.