There are many technologically feasible alternatives to the Shuttle that would do the same jobs and more a lot cheaper. A practical space transportation system would involve multiple vehicles, each doing what is required of it, and only a few would be manned. I've been working in this area half my life, and I know something about this.

If cheap manned space flight is ever going to become a reality, it's probably going to have to be done by the private sector, and there's going to have to be a damn good reason for doing it. It would take pages to elaborate on this, and it involves some lessons learned the hard way in the private space business.

There is no incentive for a government agency to do ANYTHING cheaply or efficiently, and in fact there is a lot of pressure on the agency to expand a space program to make it more complex, with more vendors, more research, and generally anything that increases the power of the agency and the amount of money distributed to the constituents of those politicians who decide life or death for the agency every year. This is politics in action. The people who work at NASA are not incompetent or evil, but simply working within the system as best as they can. As I pointed out in an earlier post, long before Columbia came down (which I can't seem to locate right now), the fact that something as complex as the Shuttle has flown successfully as many times as it has, is IMO a tribute to those same NASA workers.