In today's Wall Street Journal (page A8) Charles Beichman gives a pithy diagnosis of the current state of manned space-flight in the US:
While robotic space science has produced glorious results (and a few inglorious debacles) over the past decade, human spaceflight has languished without clear goals. If you think of the space shuttle as a tugboat in the harbor of low-earth orbit, then the international space station is a man-made island built in the middle of the harbor for want of a better destination for the tugboat. While both the shuttle and the space station are wonderful engineering accomplishments, no one can really explain why they were built other than to keep the human spaceflight program alive while waiting for something better to happen. Unfortunately, instead, while we were waiting, something worse happened: 14 astronauts died in two horrible shuttle accidents. While the skill and courage of our astronauts is beyond measure, the tasks we have given them are not worthy of the risks they bear with each launch and each descent. His thrust is that at present we're confined to "harbor tours" of low earth orbit. Instead, he argues, "Let Virgin Galactic offer private harbor tours to rich tourists. We must leave the harbor and venture again into the 'blue water' of deep space."
Jim