The scientific case for a human spaceflight infrastructure

I argue that science stands to benefit from the infrastructure developed to support a human space programme. By infrastructure I mean all those facili ties and capabilities which purely scientific budgets could never afford to develop, but which nevertheless act to facilitate scientific research whic h would not otherwise take place. For example, the human presence on the Mo on during the Apollo Project resulted in the acquisition of scientific data which would not have been obtained otherwise, and the same is likely to ho ld true for future human missions to both the Moon and Mars (and indeed els ewhere). In the more distant future, an important scientific application of a well-developed human spaceflight infrastructure may be the construction of interstellar space probes for the exploration of planets around other ne arby stars.