I want a trip to LEO. I want to do all that cool stuff I've been watching a few astronauts do for the past 40 years. I don't think we need hotels up there, just 3 or 4 hours of playing and sightseeing. Maybe an inflatable chamber or big empty fuel tank with windows built in the sides.
I see NASA, as currently constituted, as more of a hindrence than help in achieving that goal. These government agencies all have thier own little institutional cultures. NASA's is still "Money is no object- look at this neat video- and if you ask how much it costs, you are an EVIL LUDDITE and an ENEMY OF ALL HUMAN PROGRESS!!>8-0
NASA spends way too much on using 90 year old liquid fuel rocket tech to get more neat little videos and pictures of more or less the same stuff we saw 30 years ago. What has the ISS done and why is it worth HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS? Is it possible that 10 billion of those dollars spent on earth would have yielded more worthwhile tech? Sure NASA has also done some neat science, but most of that doesn't mean anything to anyone but a couple thousand scientists. It's not the kind of stuff that can really motivate a 13 year old to go into engineering.
I wonder what we would have now if we had taken a different course. Mercury and Gemini were necessary stepping stones, I think landing a man on the moon ONE TIME was worthwhile for inspiration and national prestige. A Skylab program to run for a couple of years wouldn't have been too bad since we already had the SaturnV. I remember the meeting of the US and USSR in orbit as a positive suggestion of future cooperation in space. What if we had completely ENDED our manned space program then and there in the early '70s? Would it really have been such a terrible loss? Those flyby probes up to the Voyagers provided some great pics. Viking gave us some too. What if we had ended the deep system probes in the mid-'70s? After all, we still would have had an enormous collection of video of summersaulting astronauts and pics of Saturn. We could have cut those into great inspirational films for the schoolkids.
What if we had taken a fraction of the money we've spent on flipping astronauts and deep system photostunts and gave it to DARPA, an organization with a better track record of sponsoring effective prize contests and R&D for the money, so they could develope new propulsion tech to get us into orbit for a small fraction of the cost? Would some crazy engineers have gone into their garages and come out with a solution by now?
I'm all for Mission To Earth sattelites to examine our planet and magnetosphere as well as some to examine the Sun and it's effect on the Earth and others to look out for approaching asteroids. We have to remember that the deep system stuff has been up there for billions of years and will all be there 30 years from now when we should have the tech to take much greater leaps of understanding in a much shorter space of time.
Also, I'm tired of watching flipping astronauts who aren't me!