Scrap The Shuttles

The government this week will resume spending billions of dollars launching people into space for not better reason then, well, launching people into space.
NASA and its shuttle program are the ultimate examples of self-perpetuating bureaucracy. We design and build spacecraft so we can test them and learn how to build better spacecraft. We carry out experiments in space to learn how well we can live in space to carry out more experiments.
Sure, it would be lovely to get to the point where we can travel to other planets and explore them, but the proponderance of scientific evidence is that, regardless of what you see on Star Trek, it will never be possible. Just getting to the closest planet, Mars would take months, and years to get anywhere else, and human beings probably couldn't survive very well in space for all that time, especially when we're prone to mishaps like Apollo 13 and the two shuttle disasters. Real astronauts know, and have said, that the faster-than-light-speed travel you see in the movies is a scientific joke.
Sure I'd like to know if there might be microbes on Mars or evidence of earlier life. I'd also like to see cancer, AIDS and other plagues cured in my lifetime, needless famine eliminated from the planet and the world weaned off the narcotic of oil for cleaner and more effective energy sources. Strip NASA down to watching the skies for perilous meteorites and launching a few robot probes a year to gather some space data and you've got billions to make a dent in some of those causes.
In 2003, seven Americans and an Israeli gave their lives aboard an aging spaceship (I wouldn't take a 22-year-old car on a long highway trip; how do we fly 22-year old shuttles into space?) for the cause of conducting a few meager experiments in space and testing out some new equipment. Unless there is a more classified purpose of the mission we haven't heard, the toll simply wasn't worth the potential gain.
The real reason we're so interested in space is hubris. It's the rocket's red glare of our days, those flaming behemoths soaring into the clouds that tell the rest of the world how mighty and impressive we are. Reaching for other planets has superpower written all over it.
But if we tried, we might find that eliminating a disease or two, making a dent in global warming (even acknowledging it!) and taking better care of the planet we're on might also win us an admirer or two.