Focusing On the Manned Space Program

Really, at the end of the line, but like Jack Nicholson says, we 'can't handle the truth':

Let’s be blunt here. The shuttle program has long outlived its scientific usefulness. The technology is outdated and, given the track record of two disasters in the past 21 years, manifestly unsafe. More seriously – from the taxpayer’s point of view, as well as the scientific research establishment’s – it doesn’t do anything to advance the cause of science at all.

You won’t hear this being discussed in the mainstream media, but the truth is that it is one giant boondoggle, what Constance Penley of the University of California at Santa Barbara calls “pork in space.”

“The only reason the shuttle program exists is to support the International Space Station,” Penley told me. “And the only reason the International Space Station exists is for the shuttle to have somewhere to fly to.”

Sure, the ISS is supposed to be a floating laboratory conducting all manner of scientific experiments. But, the fact is, it doesn’t do any of that. Its only rationale at this point is its own existence, no more and no less. The only discernible science carried out by the Endeavour mission was to carry 10 million basil seeds into space to track the effect of zero-gravity on the seeds’ progress into plants (and thence, one presumes, into millions of plates of insalata tricolore). Hardly a project commensurate with Endeavour’s $5 billion cost.

...The only thing saving NASA from utter ignominy is its lingering reputation as the can-do, all-American, last-frontier agency of The Right Stuff. Like so much of the Bush administration, it is far more interested in image than reality – in part because the reality is so uncomfortable to contemplate. And so it lurches from PR stunt to PR stunt. Barbara Morgan, in other words, isn’t just a graduate of the Teacher in Space program who has managed to become a full-fledged astronaut. What she is, essentially, is Jessica Lynch in space – a grand propaganda distraction designed to cover up a whole lot of ugliness.