Pork Barrels to Mars

It irritates me that NASA gets to spend $2.3 billion on the Mars Rover, a mission of little scientific merit, and that the $4-7 billion being spent on the LHC is considered exorbitant. "Space science" isn't even science, it's geography. Which, sadly, makes it automatically appealing to the public, and therefore an impeccable candidate for pork-barrel spending.