If it does decide to fund the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) to replace the Shuttle as the primary vehicle to carry crews to and from the Station, the question must be faced even earlier, as the basic design of the OSP must be decided within two years.

A large majority of space scientists think that we should cut back on the number of manned spaceflights over the next few decades, and maybe almost totally eliminate them.

As former official NASA historian Alex Roland says: "Some of the Shuttle's limitations are inherent in all human spaceflight. Whenever people are put on a spacecraft, the mission of that vehicle changes. From research, exploration, manufacturing or other applications, the spacecraft must turn its primary attention to life support and life-saving.

"The spacecraft has less range, less duration, less flexibility and less capacity than if the people were not aboard. Having the people on board becomes an end in itself. Any activities they might perform are secondary to the primary goal of simply bringing them back alive."

He added that any usefulness a crew may have in carrying out emergency on-the-spot repairs is tremendously outweighed by the enormous amount of additional equipment needed simply to keep them alive -- most of which cannot possibly be repaired by them in orbit.

"The vaunted capacity of humans in situ to adjust to unforeseen circumstances was belied by the tragic flight of Columbia. The astronauts on board were powerless to survey the damage, let alone fix it."

George Low -- NASA's associate administrator during the Apollo program -- says that anything we want to do in space is ten times more expensive if you send people to do it than it you send remote-controlled machines to do it.

Experienced aerospace engineer T.A. Heppenheimer says, "This disparity of as much as ten to one is likely to persist. The reason is that, while a Shuttle mission may launch spacecraft, its true goal is not to carry that payload to orbit. Rather, it is to bring its crew back safely...

"Manned spaceflight [is] still a sport of governments, having no life of its own. Meteorologists and communications managers, among others, have long relied routinely on unmanned spacecraft.

"No such community exists to support manned missions, and the reason is simple: They are far too costly for the limited benefit they can provide to users... The rapid advent of advanced electronics made the space station obsolete before it could be built, by spurring the development of unmanned spacecraft. In the words of the playwright Nigel Kneale, the space station concept was 'almost worn out before anything arose to claim it.' "

A particularly dramatic piece of evidence is to compare the cost of the Apollo 8 lunar-orbit mission to that of the Voyager 2 spacecraft -- which traveled to a world over 12,000 times farther away from Earth than the Moon is (and made far more scientific observations there to boot), at about 1/20 the cost.

It is, of course, true that remote-controlled equipment has its limits with our current level of robotic technology (which won't last forever) -- and it has a much more permanent and critical limitation due to the speed of light and hence communication signals, which makes it virtually impossible to remotely control equipment in any extremely sophisticated way on any world farther away than the Moon.

At some point in the moderately distant future, manned deep space expeditions really will become necessary to extend our scientific knowledge of the Solar System beyond a certain point.

But such expeditions will still be extremely expensive, even with the improved space technology of the decades to come -- and they are so staggeringly expensive with our present-day technology that it is absolutely ridiculous to assume that their scientific or commercial benefits could remotely justify them now, even for such a monumental subject as the study of life on Mars.

Even Gerard O'Neill and his successors -- who think it economically worthwhile to mine the Moon or near-Earth asteroids for one particular purpose: construction materials to build a network of huge Earth-orbiting solar power satellites more cheaply than their components could be launched from Earth -- have always emphasized that this should be done almost entirely by robots, rather than manned crews.

The time for manned deep-space expeditions to be worthwhile will not come until about the middle of this century.

There is, of course, the "spiritual" argument for manned spaceflight: that it's far more inspiring emotionally than "cold, unemotional" exploration by robots -- which boils down simply to the belief that people enjoy the idea of explorers risking their lives more than is necessary to achieve their goals.

In his Feb. 26 "SpaceDaily" editorial, John Carter McKnight responds to my argument to this effect by pointing out that, when push comes to shove, the average human doesn't find pure space science all that fascinating or worthwhile, either: "Put everything currently funded by taxes on a cash-and-carry basis and see how many people pony up for X-ray observatories versus space hotels. Please."

However, even ignoring the fact that X-ray space observatories cost only a fraction of a percent as much as space hotels will cost, McKnight is expressing a truth he hadn't intended: space enthusiasts of ALL types -- including those interested purely in space science -- should remember that they will always comprise a very tiny fraction of the human race, and should therefore be decidedly non-arrogant in demanding that the taxpayers fork over large sums of cash for their own preferred hobby.

A rationally designed U.S. government space program - as many have suggested - would transfer NASA's space science functions to a body such as the National Science Foundation and fund all space science out of the total government funding of scientific research provided by some Cabinet-level Department of Science.

Finally, we should keep in mind that the real reasons many average people are fascinated by space exploration, while they have nothing to do with rarified science, also have little to do with anything requiring a human body standing on a spacecraft's particular target world.

Scientists are fond of sneering at the idea that "getting pretty pictures" should be one of the main goals of space probes. They should remember that another word for "pretty pictures" is "art".

But advocates of manned spaceflight should also remember that modern technology enables us -- unlike any other generation of humans before us -- to send our eyes and minds to new worlds without the vast difficulty and expense of lugging our bodies along as well.

Most of the aspects of space exploration that have most fascinated regular people in recent decades -- the Hubble Telescope, the search for life on Mars, the exploration of the giant outer planets and their strange moons -- have had nothing to do with either esoteric science OR with manned space exploration, and they have been tremendously less expensive than the latter.

In any case, any manned deep-space exploration to Mars and beyond is a long way off. The question that concerns us for the next couple of decades is: to what extent should we fly manned spacecraft in low Earth orbit, and for what reasons?

In that SpaceDaily editorial discussing possible motivations for manned spaceflight, McKnight ends up saying, "Were launch costs $100 a pound, everyone would be free to go seek their root values in space, civilization-builders and geologists and robber barons alike."

True, of course, that when launch costs get that low, manned space travel will be economical enough to be justifiable for a whole multitude of reasons -- especially since the taxpayers won't have to fund most of it anymore.

But it's going to be a rather long time before launch costs do get that low -- two decades at a rock bottom minimum, and probably considerably longer.

What do we do in the meantime -- especially since the high cost of short-term manned spaceflight is already cutting seriously into the funds that might be used to develop cheaper launch vehicles in the first place?

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