No Plan B

[tw]

This has repeatedly been exampled as good money wasted on bad science. It sucks up about 90% of the money and does about 0% of the science. It was only suppose to cost $8billion. It caused the destruction of real science - the Super Collider. Now it again is causing problems.
From The Economist of 12 Mar 2005

No plan B for outer space
Spend $40 billion building a big tin can in orbit round the Earth, in order -at least in part - to keep the rocket scientists of your former enemy from going to work for your current enemies. Then find that a law intended to stop the current enemies getting their hands on such rocket scientists' knowledge means you can no longer use this expensive tin can. Confused? You are not the only one. Because that, in a nutshell, is what is about to happen to American space policy unless the law is amended. Indeed, it looks likely that if the law is not changed, America's entire manned-spaceflight effort, and another $50 billion of spending with it, could come to nothing.

[tw]

Cited by The Economist as background for this article is an Opinion published on 25 Oct 2001 which provide a timeline for how long the manned space flight program has been unproductive.

Unmanned
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: sending people into space is pointless. It is dangerous, costly and scientifically useless. Yet this is a lesson that NASA, America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has never managed to learn. As a result, it has lurched from crisis to crisis. Most of these crises have been budgetary (the combined cost of the International Space Station and the fleet of space shuttles needed to service it is almost $5 1/2 billion a year). But even the explosion of a shuttle in the mid 1980s, which killed its crew and a civilian passenger, was not enough to close down the manned-spaceflight programme.

At the moment, this is kept alive by three things. The first is showmanship. NASA feels (correctly) that it has to keep taxpayers on its side, and also (more dubiously) that manned flights are the way to do that. Second, the space station helps diplomatic relations with Russia, the number-two partner in the enterprise, and also keeps lots of Russian rocket scientists out of the pay of countries such as Iraq and North Korea. Third, and most disgracefully, it puts billions of dollars into the pockets of aerospace companies such as Boeing. It is, in other words, a disguised industrial subsidy. ...
Probably, NASA will take this advice only when pigs fly. Then again, it has been launching pork barrels into orbit for years.

What is it not? Science.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I think manned space flights are a good idea. I even have a short list of people I'd like to send.