[hakko]

The ISS takes over 10% of NASA's budget at over $3b/year in maintenance, so they won't be able to take care of it and sustain their proposed moon mission at the same time. Plus the low-hanging fruit for research has already been performed. My unpopular opinion is that manned spaceflight is an expensive national vanity project for modest research gains, and the projects that have been most successfull from a science perspective have been the deep space probes/space telescopes.

[londons_explore]

> modest research gains

You also have to add in the PR benefits of each. If children aren't interested in space today, there won't be any government funding for space missions when those children become voters.

In that light, dropping manned missions entirely will probably reduce interest in space quite a bit. Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock.

[throwaway0a5e]

> Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock.

Over the past 20yr hose rovers had gone from "testing the composition of probably dead rocks" to "actively looking for signs of current or former microbial life". Even the landings have gone from "shoot the thing at the planet and wait to hear back from it" to a live-streamed helicopter drop. I think they've excliped the ISS in terms of excitement for the junior-high and above crowd. Skyping someone in a blue jumpsuit who's floating around in a tube doesn't have the cool factor that "literally on another planet" gets you.