Genius reporting on the joke that is US manned space flight...
There is no longer much pretense that shuttle flights in particular, or manned space flight in general, has any practical value. You will still occasionally hear people repeating the old NASA lines about the joys of microgravity manufacturing and insights into osteoporesis, but if you repeat these tales to a materials scientist or a physiologist, you will get peals of laughter in return. To seek a cure for osteoporesis by spending $500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth orbit is a bit like… well, it is so extravagantly preposterous that any simile you can come up with falls flat. It is like nothing else in the annals of human folly.
I have said this for a long time. Manned space flight is worthless, it gains us nothing, it costs way too much, and it's outright dangerous. The number of flights compared with the number of space shuttle deaths- if any airline ran their business this way and had the same proportion of fatal flights...well, no airline on earth would even have the chance to reach the same flight to death ratio, because it would soon be out of business and it's model would be shunned by everyone with a brain. NASA's manned space flight program outlived its usefulness decades ago, but sadly we have wasted obscenely huge amounts of money and gotten very little in return.
Asking the public to pay for it is the biggest problem of all (as the article points out), and manned space flight is so unbelievably cost ineffective that it's a laugh to even think that we spend billions on that every thing every year. That is, unfortunately, the nature of the game for many politicians and NASA employees who seem to be living in far off alien lands already. It's also a warning to President Bush that he needs to come back to reality and abandon his absurd dreams of once again spending huge sums of money going to the moon and one day to Mars. We clearly have better things to spend our time, money, and resources on...sending dreamers into space ships to do nothing isn't one of them.
I am distressed by people that have such a limited imagination about the need for man to have a future. There is no future on the earth. It is dead in a few million years. If these people had their way, we would still be huddled around a fire in a cave because expending energy for developing technology (like chipping flint to make spear points)to improve life was a waste.