Shuttle program

The NASA shuttle program is due to be shut down in a little over a decade. There has been a lot of work by several design companies to come up with a replacement. The current idea is to send people and supplies on separate flights. The crew vehicle can be smaller and lighter, eliminating the need for so much fuel, and consequently avoiding the whole foam damage issue.
The hope is that the new system can lay the groundwork for finally getting the International Space Station completed, a new mission to the moon and eventually a manned mission to Mars.
The problem with doing anything in space is the cost of getting anything into a solid orbit. At over twenty thousand dollars per kilo (or ten thousand per pound for those of you who refuse to get with the metric system), transport is the prohibitive factor. Shuttles have brought the cost down considerably, being reusable. If personnel needed a new vehicle for every single trip, it just wouldn't work.
I sometimes wonder what the effect would be if we could ever get the cost of shipping stuff reliably into space below the five thousand dollar per tonne mark. What if putting stuff into orbit or onto the moon were no more expensive than shipping a bunch of cars from Japan to North America? How long would it be before somebody got the idea of moving all of our messiest manufacturing off of the planet? You want steel, Mars is practically made up of iron ore.
The second, and by far the most difficult problem to get past is human nature. Once we can send people off of the planet easily and cheaply, somebody is going to exploit that. Where the Chinese Snakeheads now smuggle people into North America to work in sweat shops and brothels, they would now send them to places so far, that the law would not be able to find them. The factories on Mars that I spoke of would be staffed by slave labour conscripted from the poor and vulnerable.
Still, I like the idea of proper space exploration. Enough experimenting to see how people react to weightlessness. We know that already. One third of us lose our lunch. We can create large enough vessels to generate spin for artificial gravity anyway.
We should concentrate on bringing the cost of getting people and supplies down to that magic number. Then we can rebuild the Space Station as an orbiting construction yard for space probes and vessels for deep space exploration. By the time we finally have the infrastructure ready, maybe we will be ready as a people to get out and see what the universe has to offer.