But the ISS does do science, for example the article on salmonella virulence I posted the other day. It can be argued that the science alone could have been done more cheaply by unmanned satellites, but space exploration is an adventure, and adventures are more compelling when a person is there having them. Thats why I'm a fan of it, the science is a nice side effect of manned spaceflight not a justification for it. Space is a resource for everyone, including sci-fi addled dreamers, and since it's their tax money paying for ISS as much as anyones if they get a good buzz out of it as it goes by overhead then they've spent their money well. If you don't like it you're free to object, and you do!

I'd much rather privately funded organizations were doing manned spaceflight, rather than governments, so people wanting the maximum science return for their tax money weren't upset, but that still seems to be in its infancy. So I'll yell for governments to spend money on manned spaceflight until private companies are ready to do it instead.

And as one final point, if we did get rid of manned spaceflight, we wouldn't have the equipment or people to go and fix damaged satellites, like the Hubble, and we'd be loosing valuable science done by unmanned spacecraft.

Which is not to say the ISS hasn't been a badly managed, inefficiently spent mess, a long way from it's original potential, but I'll take it over nothing, and I hope it's kept going well past 2015.