At this time of celebration of the achievements of Apollo 11, in fact of all 12 men who walked on the Moon, we shouldn't feel guilty about asking some questions about some of the other big projects scientists have come up with. But I'm not going to criticise the Apollo programme itself. They set out to do something challenging but achievable, and they pulled it off.

Unfortunately, US manufacturing industry has not been as successful. It has been starved of investment by lots of different groups. By bankers and investors who preferred easier pickings in the Far East. By an overblown property market which sucked in capital into concrete and brick. And by scientists. Scientists pursuing their own agenda, ie research and gold-plated jobs, have also sucked a huge amount of resources from manufacturing. But they are in many respects the worst offenders. Because they are more intelligent than bankers and real estate tycoons, you would expect them to know better and do the right thing. Unfortunately a number of contentious big ticket projects have sucked in time, brainpower and dollars that could all have been setting America up nicely, for example, as the future of battery design for electric vehicles, or of clean burn technology for coal resources, and for wave after wave of desirable and cutting edge consumer goods. Hardly any of this happened. But the deficit did. Let's take a quick look at some of what the US got instead for an awful lot of its tax dollars.

The International Space Station will be completed in a few years at an overall cost of $100bn to $150bn depending on which journal you read, the majority from the US. Most scientists admit in private that it's a complete waste of space- literally, with almost no real science being performed.  Each Shuttle trip costs in excess of $300m. Worse, in 2016 it could even suffer the same fate as the two previous space stations, that is burn up in re-entry if no further funds are given to NASA to keep it up. At least $100bn up in smoke. As if that isn't bad enough, let's factor in the retirement of the Shuttle in 2010. That leaves only the Russians with the capability to service the ISS. Now, when has a company or nation with a monopoly ever maintained prices? That's right. Never. In 2010, the Soyuz  programme's costs are going to go through the roof. It will be a nice little earner, as the Brits say.

Those costs are of course limited in scope. But that kind of money invested in manufacturing industry could have created spin-off products and employment elsewhere. So the real objective cost could include what you've lost by missing out on supporting manufacturing. All those scientists could have been leading conventional engineers, who could have trained other engineers, and so on. And I haven't even mentioned the cost to the deficit of all the products other nations make or assemble instead and that have had to be imported. Even that figure of $150bn starts to look conservative by comparison. The overall cost is, well, astronomic. That's just one project. There are a number of others.

Will there be an end to all this sci-fi delusion? Well, there's also the possibility of a 'Mission To Mars.' This could work as a suicide mission to deposit an American astronaut dead or alive on the surface, with no hope of return, but as a real mission it's a non-starter. It's portrayed as like the Moon mission but just a bit further- but the dangers of space and the debilitating effects of zero-G for several  years can't be countered. And who can tell what their health will be like two or three years from now? Because that's how long a mission could take, and that's a long time away from a hospital. Total cost estimated? It's hard to get a clear answer, but upwards of $300bn is likely if it ever goes ahead (without inflation, cost over-runs, re-designs, using incompatible measuring systems,  etc). It costs over $5k using the Shuttle to put a pound of anything into space. Imagine the equipment needed to put men on Mars, help them survive for 6 months to a year to 18 months depending on the plan. And then bring them all back safely. It's impossible to do, and it's impossible to fund.

It is more than likely that the next astronauts on the Moon will be Chinese. That's okay. And if they also want to go to Mars, NASA could encourage them, because even the country with the richest banks in the world couldn't afford it. Meanwhile, the US could concentrate all its resources on reviving manufacturing and creating real jobs for real people. And that really would be a giant leap forward for the US economy.