Check out this excellent review of why the space shuttle is a bit of a joke. you might miss this in the foot notes

The original Shuttle plan called for launch costs in the range of $10 - $20 million. A commonly cited figure puts the actual cost at $400 million.

So to put these things in space costs
$400 000 000
And refering to an earlier post…

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending

Which, to give you a better idea of size, is written $1 700 000 000
So there’s 28 shuttle flights scheduled over the next 5 years (which to recap, for those at the back, the aforementioned article points out are pretty pointless) 28/5 = a mean of 5.6 flights a year 5.6*400000000 = 2240000000.

$2 240 000 000 a year for pointless manned space flight.
$1 700 000 000 is how much we’d need to spend to give everyone clean drinking water.
hmmm.
Anyway, I’m a supporter of unmanned space exploration even though it is essentially pointless, I tend to believe that exploring and finding out new stuff and generally expressing curiosity is an important part of being human. On the other hand, the amount of money wasted on sending people into space, as opposed to lightweight naturally vaccuum resistant machines (cooling issues aside), is actually pretty disgusting when you put it in any kind of context.

BONUS : Richard Feynman’s excellent apendix to the report on the challenger accident. If I remember correctly this was meant to be part of the main report but was considered so embarrasing that it was sidelined and was lucky to get an appendix in the final document.