That was sarcasm, hence the mentioning of the inevitability of the destruction of earth, and the second para about space exploration being the only thing that actually matters.
[The shuttles] reusable design philosophy held back engineering advances for decades. The next generation of space vehicles starkly resembles the Apollo modules. Because of the political investment in a space plane, it will take forty years to return to the Apollo solution that was first and best. Imagine if the Shuttle engineers had spent the past forty years perfecting the capsule rather than patching a design that quickly proved to be deeply flawed.
my bad, discostu. I did not get the sarcasm.