How do we get into these situations? Why do people always insist on turning things like this into zero-sum games, where anything that the manned space exploration part of NASA loses, the unmanned side gains, and vice versa? And we all know what's going to happen anyway - whatever money is saved by shutting down the Shuttle program isn't going to go toward new unmanned space science; it's just going to vanish in the overall Federal budget.
Nobody wins, as far as I can see.
Now the only way to get people into space is the Russian Soyuz. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Soyuz except that it is too small, can't carry any meaningful cargo, and can only barely reach orbit in the first place (the reason Mir and the ISS have to be re-boosted every so often is because the basic Soyuz-U booster can't reach a higher orbit, so the ISS has to orbit so low it encounters a good deal of atmospheric drag). Ever seen the interior of a Soyuz TMA with the crew aboard? It looks like one of those fraternity row stunts where they try to pack as many people into a phone booth as possible.
Soyuz just doesn't seem like the road to the future. Neither did the Shuttle, to be honest, as its design requirements forced it to be much heavier and less efficient than it should have been (in particular, the abandonment of the "flyback booster" and the high cross-range wing demanded by the single-revolution return to launch site abort requirement). But I always thought the shuttle would just be a sort of stand-in while a more sensible replacement was developed.
But no. Turns out, there is no replacement. The Shuttle is gone, and all that's left is Soyuz. No X-33, no NASP, no Lockheed Starclipper, no Rockwell low-cross-range orbiter, nothing. In a single move, we go right back to the same booster that launched Sputnik. I don't see that as a positive development.
I am occasionally accused of being opposed to unmanned space science, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Unmanned probes often return astounding insight into the nature of things, and often at next to no cost. It is quite impossible to look at the accomplishments of such unmanned probes as COBE, WMAP, Galileo, Voyager 1 and 2, Opportunity, Spirit, Viking, SOHO and others without being forced to say "Yeah, those were excellent investments."
But I also happen to believe that people have business being in space, and I think that the next logical objective should be the establishment of a manned presence on Mars.
So to me, it isn't a question of unmanned space science or manned space science; I think it should be both. Yes, I'm a naive dreamer. But is seems to me that if we as a society can spend billions on hair replacement, billions on erection pills, and billions on breast enhancement, we could also spend billions on manned and unmanned space science.
But honestly, I don't think we give a rat's ass any more. The Far Left is suspicious of space science, because it rejects the notion of science in general. The postmodernist stance seems to be that science is "just another myth" and that "the project of the Enlightenment is dead." (It amuses me that they use the product of that "western scientific myth", namely computers and the Internet, to write and publish their profoundly mistaken bullshit.*) Religious conservatives, on the other hand, are known to argue that anything we need to know is already encoded in scripture and that attempts to learn about ourselves and the universe amount to some kind of strange secular assault on religion. And in between, the majority of Americans seem so absorbed by numbnut celebrities, the wonders of their smart phones, and irrelevancies like "style" and "self-expression" to have any kind of curiosity about the universe around us.**
And meantime, people who should really be allies - the proponents of manned and unmanned space exploration - savage one another to try to get as much of the dwindling pie as they can.
*I recently read a quote from some postmodern scholar that argued that Einstein's famous equivalence, E = MC^2, is "sexed" and "biased" because it accords a special power and significance to the speed of light, thus discriminating against other speeds that are just as useful to us. But what galls me even more than the aggressive stupidity of this allegation is that I can just picture this scholar's acolytes, all shaking their heads and whispering oh, the injustice! That Einstein was SUCH a white male oppressor! Sometimes all I can do is grip my forehead in both hands and sigh.
**Here's a "fun" (read "depressing") statistic. According to CNBC, the "diet industry" amounted to $59.7 billion last year. NASA's budget for 2010 was about $18.7 billion.
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