[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.