Derbyshire: End of an Extravaganza (The Space Shuttle program)

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzc2NTYxMzVjNWRkMzc0YzQ0Y2VhNGI1ZGRkMTc2N2I=

Today, after 126 shuttle flights across 28 years and an expenditure of several hundred billion dollars, not one American in ten could give you an answer, and the occasional exception would be unable to explain why the work might not have been done as well by robots at one-tenth the cost. Probably most people who had any clue at all would mention servicing the International Space Station, or, with last month's mission in mind, keeping the Hubble Space Telescope in operation. But then, your respondent could not tell you the point of the station, or give you a comparative-cost analysis of servicing Hubble with shuttles at half a billion per mission versus just sending up a replacement Hubble on an unmanned launcher. Still less could he explain why any of this was government business.

In fact, the main purpose of the International Space Station is to give the shuttle something to do. So far as Hubble is concerned, most of the construction costs were in planning, design, and development. We could have built half a dozen copies for little more than it cost to build the first, and put a replacement in orbit on an unmanned rocket whenever one conked out, saving ourselves billions in shuttle costs.