The space shuttle's themselves didn't fail, they just lived out their useful lives (or 'sploded...) without any replacement. Besides, they were always only meant to be ferries between earth and space, hence the word "shuttle", and I think they have done an admirable job of that.

The shuttle is a Ferrari, when what was needed was a pickup truck. It was a stupid design then, and having come up with nothing new for thirty years -- even the youngest shuttle craft is almost twenty years old -- is just embarrassing. Nobody takes a Ferrari to the corner store for milk, which is the extent of the missions they've performed.

Ehh, I think I agree with you that humans aren't meant to live in space or colonize space, but I think we're tough enough to visit every once in a while.

Oh, if only the US had been as smart as the USSR, and not wasted a lot of money on a foolish space shuttle program. Oh, wait, that's right, the Soviet Union spent billions on their Buran program, which managed one unmanned flight before being abandoned (literally - one of the Buran models ended up sitting in a field and local Kazakh teens would use it as a hangout to drink in). The former Baikonur spaceport collapsed from lack of upkeep, destroying another Buran along with eight people who were inside the hangar.

And China just recently tried to cheat off of our answers, sending a spy to Boeing to try to steal our Delta rocket and Space Shuttle technologies:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2009/07/chun…

At least India's not foolish enough to waste their effort on a Space Shuttle. Oh, wait:

http://en.rian.ru/world/20070813/7120353…

Whoops. Meant to include a link to pictures of the abandoned Buran:

http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2011/…

Also, speaking of abandoned technologies, apparently the GOP House wants to gut one of the United States' major science research facilities, to the tune of almost a thousand research jobs:

http://timbishop.house.gov/index.cfm?sec…

that last sentence-

if by human, you mean warm and fuzzy, sure, but if you mean inhabitable, that's not quite right. it's just hostile. space shuttle wasnt a total failure. at it's inception there was incredible optimism about aeronautic progress. we made it to the moon only 65 years after first flight. rather, the problem of human habitation of space is much more difficult than envisioned.
life is everywhere, in the most unlikely places, floating around the void of space. we'll get there, eventually.

132 missions in 30 years is not by any stretch "a failure" Charles.

And while it's true the Russians have maintained dominance in both manned and unmanned launch capabilities during much of that time, (44% of all government-sponsored launches in 2010), it's also worth noting that practically all of the innovation in the private sector of the industry is occurring right here in the Good Ole' U.S. of A. SpaceX recently successfully launched the world's first commercial manned orbital vehicle prototype, while Scaled Composites (partly owned by Paul Allen) still has the only successful privately manned sub-orbital flights under its belt, and is in the process of ramping up to full-scale commercial passenger flights. Meanwhile, a whole cadre of other private companies: Bigelow, XCOR, Garvey, SpaceDev, Sea Launch (partly owned by Boeing) & Blue Origin (funded by Jeff Bezos - notice the strong PNW presence here?) are just a few that come off the top of my head.

The simple fact is that the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning much of the nation's space transportation infrastructure from NASA into the private sector, which makes perfect sense, seeing as aerospace companies have been designing, building and maintaining the bulk of that infrastructure pretty much since Day One. The only difference is that, rather than relying on the changing political winds that drive NASA's budget, they're striking out on their own, putting up their own risk capital, but also taking the opportunity to reap the benefits for their innovation.

In the future, it won't be Russia, or India, or even China that commercial industry goes to to launch its satellites - it'll be other commercial entities such as the ones above. And most of those, for the foreseeable future at least, are going to be based on U.S. soil.

Charles, what is it with your freak-out about us leaving the planet?

It can't merely be cost. I would suppose that if you were really interested in us saving money to better ourselves, you would go after defense spending, that has a budget that makes NASA look like the church bingo pool.

So I have to assume you have something visceral against space exploration. Is it "natural"? No. Neither is communicating via the internet. Neither, in evolutionary terms, is living in cities. Are you just afraid of space? No one is going to force you to go, you know.

The whole purpose of the space shuttle was to build the ISS. That was the only reason the program existed. The ISS was the starting point for a manned mission to Mars. The shuttle program did branch off to other areas of micro-gravity research and also acted as a feel good program for the Reagan administration. Now that the ISS is essentially finished, albeit late, the shuttle serves no purpose anymore, especially with its extremely outdated technology. It's a design from the 1970s, which is why NASA has been trying to replace it since the late 80s, so far to no avail. Though, as pointed out above, it did prove quite useful in fixing the Hubble telescope. It was never intended as a launch vehicle for satellites the way the Atlas V is, so your whole point about keeping man from doing a machine's job doesn't make any sense.

The Space Shuttle Program didn't fail, it's just over. That's a good thing. We learned a lot from it, and hopefully the next time the US goes into manned space missions, it will be significantly improved upon, but only time will tell on that since it is looking less and less likely anybody is willing to pay for it.

Nobody has used the shuttle to launch a sat in years. They use whatever rocket they can book, whether it's American, Russian, French or whatever. The Russian boosters are relatively cheap, and mostly reliable (except for that one last month, where they over-fueled the upper stage, and the pig was too heavy to make orbit.) The Pentagon has recently even started recycling mothballed Minuteman II missiles to launch LEO recon birds. It's not as if the rest of the space program shut down while they were flying the shuttle.