Ah yea, last shuttle went up today. Kinda surprising considering it was raining all day. Pardon my ignorance for being both an American and a east coast Florida resident and not knowing this, but that new space thing is still going to take a while right? Don't we have some obligation to these other countries to have a functional space program so we can contribute? It seems quite a bit like we're ignoring our promises or something, am I just missing something?
Most likely a good chunk, if not all of it, will be done through
SpaceX in the future when it comes to the US's ISS stuff. By the looks of it, they already have
4 flights planned by the end of 2012, one of which may take place at some point this year. The craft is also being designed to be human-capable, although it won't get full certification for all that stuff until awhile after the first few ISS resupply missions. And with a price tag currently set at under 60 million per launch, compared to 450m for the shuttle; though it will have a much lower payload capacity (falcon 9 will have 10k kg compared to 25k kg for the shuttle; future spacex variants will have higher capacity than the shuttle)
And best of all, SpaceX has webcasts with live video from onboard cameras looking downward in every launch.
Honestly, I'm not worried both because of their pretty good record and the company and its founder's stances stated in the past, many of which can be found in this article from shortly before the most recent launch:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/06/5600599-spacex-gets-set-for-next-giant-leapBetween all the various companies aiming to make space travel viable, the part of NASA I'm most concerned about are the aforementioned unmanned projects. Various data collection missions are getting axed left and right; mostly due to cost overruns in bigger projects like the James Webb telescope; which from what I've heard has become quite the boondoggle of late. Although I can't quite say whether or not I agree with it being cancelled; on the one hand, it should have been cancelled years ago, and on the other, it should have been cancelled years ago. Thus is the problem with letting bad decisions go unopposed... the costs balloon until cancelling it and for the most part dumping the spent money become unthinkable. >_<