Maybe this mission even cost a Billion by the time of all the reschedules and retraining, etc. How many years has this been in the planning phase, canceled, then resurrected? You notice how hard it is to ever find what manned missions actually cost. (And I mean adding up everything that supports those missions.)

The probability is an entirely new probe could've been put up for the same money as it cost to repair it. Or we might've accelerated deployment of the next generation (Webb) telescope...although some things can't really be rushed.

What I want to see is a paradigm of having goals and achieving them with the most cost effective approach. I happen to believe that means designing anything that is likely to need to be repaired or updated off world to be very modular and relatively easy for automated or teleoperated repair.

I know those spacewalking astronauts had a blast, but is it really worth a $500 million of (extra) tax payer money to pay for their enjoyment.

What I notice over and over, is that many government agencies start out well as a pretty good idea and then they eventually succumb to bureacratic turf protection at the expense of tax payers (see post office, NASA, etc.).

One of the big arguments for manned flight is that it is worth the extra expense because it inspires children. Fine, fine, but robots can inspire children too, especially in todays world. And show me the child that wouldn't like to teleoperate a dune buggy probe on the moon. This idea that science inspiration is dependent on astronauts is yet another silly argument like the China space race.

We're finally going to complete (not really, but the rescaled back version of the original) the ISS in 2010 and have done virtually no science. We'll be paying the Russians (50M per seat?) to get astronauts there. Hopefully more than a thimble full of science will start to be done, even though nothing is guaranteed beyond 2015 and the oldest part of the station is already 10 years old.

Yet one of the few legitimate uses of the ISS (long term gravity research with a centrifuge to test Mars and Moon gravity effects), was eliminated from the experiments. So far manned space flight has been pretty much a black hole you throw money into and never expect anything to come back. Personally, I like to really find out new information (like what is returned form orbiting and planetary probes) for fractions of the cost of manned space flight.