One shuttle mission's budget would pay for the next Titanic or Star Wars film and turn a profit. Americans deserve better. But we will only get it if we demand better. Projects like John Glenn's return to space, Al Gore's Triana and the potential all-woman crew were projects that were mandated politically, and then justified scientifically only after the decision to fly was made.
Space flight is more important than that.
We suffer today with a national space effort without direction, only inertia. We slowly roll on, shuttle flights and space station construction continuing as bureaucratic friction slows the remnants of a direction originally set by Wernher von Braun in the 1950's. The space shuttle, originally promised to fly dozens of times a year has flown three times in the past year. We must set a new direction and move forward with new purpose. That direction should not be an echo of the past, although John Kennedy's moving words still move us all, now is not the time for another Apollo, a closed end mission whose goal also creates the seed of another entropic loss of momentum.