Ask Joe Sixpack what the astronauts do on the current space station
and they won't have a clue or will make some morbid jokes about just
floating around or wasting taxpayer dollars.

NASA has done a piss poor job promoting the ISS and an even worse
job making it seem exciting and useful. And the sad part is that most
of the "missions" regarding the ISS have been about maintaining it,
which is what the astronauts spend most of their time doing. Hardly
the stuff of the Apollo days.

You and I and other members here can appreciate the importance of
such experiments as the one on salmonella, but do you honestly think
the general public will care? You know they will ask why couldn't that
have been done on Earth for far less money.

By the way, I totally agree with you about how much is spent on making
the typical Hollywood blockbuster (to say nothing of the money people
shell out to see these things) that could be used for real science, but
until NASA or some other space agency starts making space exploration
exciting again, I cannot blame the masses for wanting to see fake
missions over real ones.

On the other hand, note that the unmanned missions to the planets
ARE exciting and we see the results of their efforts virtually every day.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, space exploration needs to belong to
the realm of the robots, while manned missions should be mainly for
colonization with exploration as a side benefit.