Quote Originally Posted by moeur
It is true. The cost of sending persons into orbits dwarfs the cost of any other hardware considerations.

Why do we need to send people into space?

It's all PR. If we didn't send people into space the public would not be so interested and thus the funding for NASA would be smaller. I've worked on two NASA microgravity projects and we had to calculate the cost for doing the experiments both ways. Unmanned flights are a lot cheeper and can do anything you can do with manned flights.
PR? When there is a shuttle launch its on the news for all of 10 minutes now before they go back to talking politics and wars. Them launching a shuttle is not really a big deal in the general public's eye. They only take notice when one blows up. Once something amazing has been done once, people tend to lose interest.