The Shuttle was an amazing technical achievement - but not a very good spacecraft. Of course hindsight is as they say 20/20 but the political landscape that led to the Shuttle as the primary component of the US space program may not have allowed anything else in it’s place. Sad but true that NASA is more about aerospace jobs/corporate welfare than it is about exploring and exploiting space!

Sure do wish we’d lived in the alternate world JR outlined above though...