Kraut says eloquently what I've tried to say here regarding ISS and the shuttle program.

Classic quotes...
"We slip the bonds of Earth not to spend 20 years in orbit studying zero-gravity nausea, but to set foot on new worlds, learn their mysteries, establish our presence.

What an end. What a dead end. After millennia of dreaming of flight, the human race went from a standing start at Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years. And yet in the next 34 years, we've gone nowhere. We've gone backward. We've retreated from the moon and spent our time spinning around endlessly in low-Earth orbit.

The way to consecrate the memory of those noble souls on Columbia is not to mindlessly repeat the past 20 years but to rethink the whole enterprise. For now, we need to keep the shuttle going because we have no other way to get into space. And we'll need to support the space station for a few years, because we have no other program in place.

But that is not our destiny, nor our purpose. If we're going to risk that first 150 miles of terrible stress on body and machine to get into space, then let's do it to get to the next million miles -- to cruise the beauty and vacuum of interplanetary space to new worlds. Back to the moon. Establish a lunar base. And then on to Mars."

-philw (Right on bro!)

P.S. Remember Heinliens statement paraphrased from memory, "Once in orbit, you're already halfway to anywhere" Let's finally DO SOMETHING about it. Not just SkyLab II, Gemini 135 missions.