Daniel Greenberg has a good summary of the problem with Shuttle and station over at the WaPo today.

It's all basically correct, but I want to comment on this one point.

Dating from 1981 to 1999, the surveys, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, found that between 9 and 18 percent of respondents during those years believed that the government spent "too little" on space exploration, while 39 to 52 percent felt it spent "too much." Far ahead of space exploration, spending preferences were expressed for "reducing pollution," "improving health care" and "improving education."

I'd be willing to bet that a large number of those respondents who think we are spending too much haven't a clue how much we're spending. My experience with such polls is that large numbers of people think that we spend much more on NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, than we actually do. Very few people are aware that it's less than a percent. I'd be interested to see if those numbers change if you poll people after telling them that.

Of course, the issue is not how much we're spending, but how (and how poorly) we're spending it. NASA has had more than enough money to make great progress in space over the past few decades--hundreds of billions in current-year dollars. But they haven't had the philosophy, will, or political permission to spend it sensibly, at least if our goal was to create a space-faring civilization.

Most people rank "foreign aid" as the third- (or even second-) largest item in the Federal budget, when it's ~1% or less (as is NASA). But the even larger disconnect here is the difference between input and output, or perhaps promised output and actual output -- see my Space Shuttle Economics post.

Another reason why I'm glad parts of this political process hews closer to the republic model than a democracy. I'd hate to have huge masses of uninformed people -- sometimes willfully uninformed -- attempting to make decisions.

I think this again everytime I read another poll showing how many people would be willing to jettison half the Constitution in the idiot belief it will gain them more security.

After reading one of those better spend the money on education, health care and research letters in WaPo, I did a quick bit of research.

Total NASA spending: ~13-15 billion/year
K-12 education spending, 1999-2000 academic year: $373 billion
Annual health care spending: $1.4 trillion

In short, NASA's dollars are trivial with respect to other, supposedly worthier activities. And even more to the point: transferring these small sums to education and health care ignores the problems in those fields and tells people the only thing wrong over there is not enough money. That simply isn't true. That claim is far more dishonest than NASA's claiming the shuttle would fly weekly to space at a cost of only $5 million.