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NASA should have been actively developing a replacement for the shuttle after Challenger.

The problem with NASA is so large it is hard to explain it.

They don't design spacecraft, they design artillery and man-rate it. Over the last thirty years, every failed effort from NASA has followed that paradigm.

Their greatest failure has been the inability to be the catalyst for a thriving space industry. Instead they have been a wet blanket.

The Challenger and Columbia accidents are but two symptoms of a bureaucracy in its dotage.

One of my college professors worked on Gemini and Apollo and had some interesting stories about the agency back then. Like how the attitude (up until the Apollo 1 fire) there was "waste anything but time." Back then they had a goal, a timeline and leadership that would make a decision without having to committee or task-force ideas to death. Things might have gone over budget, but at least the got done and were on schedule.

As far as today's NASA is concerned, they need to pretty much scrap most of it and develope the next generation spacecraft in a "Skunk-Works" type of operation off in the desert. We actually HAD a functioning space plane at one time, the X-15. But everyone was in love with rockets back then and now we're stuck with an aging fleet of well-intended concepts that never filled their promise.

Big, hulking monsters like the Saturn 5 are great at hauling big heavy things into orbit. X-15 type space planes are the most feasible means of getting humans into orbit. The two concepts should not cross until the private sector is ready to step up to the plate with something that doesn't cost $10,000/pound to put something in orbit.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story about this years ago.

Plot Summary

By 1960, the Soviets knew communism and central control was not a viable system.

They did not want the U.S. to dominate space, and assumed it would have had natural evolution of technology with the involvement of private industry taken place.

They started the space race with no intention of going to the moon, but to provoke a US response.

Kennedy responded, creating a huge (Soviet style) central-planning bureaucracy called NASA to go to the moon.

This subsidized behemoth then dominated the space niche preventing the involvement of private industry by its very existence.

Curiously, at present, the US does not dominate space.