Lord Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal, criticised the European Space Agency manned spaceflight programme in a recent interview with the BBC. He said ESA should give up sending humans into space and concentrate on unmanned projects.

Speaking during a week-long trip to California to promote the Royal Society, Lord Rees said manned missions were largely irrelevant. These days, no-one gets excited in the way they once did over the early Apollo programme, he added.

...and our most senior astronomer, distinguished as he is, is spectacularly wrong. Once more, with feeling:-

Space is a place, not a program.

Space is not simply a line on a science funding chart, a particular set of (somewhat expensive) experiments to answer esoteric questions about the nature of the Universe. It is a place, where human beings can go to do any human activities they choose to do, provided they've got the resources to get there... and that means commercial activities, because that is the vast majority of what human beings do -- they trade with each other. What Rees doesn't seem to grasp is that science can and will benefit from this commercial human expansion into space. Competition in commercial human spaceflight will reduce the costs and risks of getting to space, which will make space science (and umpteen other space activities) cheaper, easier and safer to do -- simply as a side benefit.

...and yes, gentle reader, I am an astronomer as well, involved in space-based astronomy projects. The difference is that I recognise that space doesn't just belong to me...

UPDATE: This is interesting... Rees' views on human spaceflight are (or at least, were) more nuanced than those expressed in the BBC article. Here's what he had to say in an interview with the Independent in 2006:

"As a scientist and practical man I'm against but as a human being I'm in favour," he says. "What I mean is that I hope in the long run that people will go into space but I think that will only be when it can be done much more cheaply by adventurers prepared to take high risks," he says. "I think the style of manned spacecraft which Nasa does, where it's got to be done with very low risks, and therefore very expensive, is so expensive as to be hardly worthwhile."

...which is less offensive, but still wrong. Now, there may very well be some "Magnificent Men in their Rocket Machines" high-risk barnstorming going in the next few years, which will be fun to watch, but Darwin is inevitably going to weed out the worst offenders. Real progress is only going to take place as part of a solid, profitable business, and a business is hardly likely to thrive if it kills off its customers with startling regularity! NewSpace's multiple technical approaches, incremental testing and aircraft-like operations promise launchers which are more safe than NASA-built systems, not less so.

Rees' comments have also attracted a backlash from a number of other UK space scientists: Royal Society president's anti-astronaut comments sparks UK backlash -- Flight Global

I'll leave the final shot to veteran BBC spaceflight reporter Reg Turnhill:-

"Rees’ attitude to human spaceflight is at least a century out of date, but does have the huge merit of getting the subject discussed. He can also be assured that future generations will remember him for all the wrong reasons."

Way to go, Reg ;-)