I wonder what spacenuts would enjoy most, in termes of a manned space program.
Plenty seem to be annoyed by astronauts turning around the Earth.
What should be next?
Private flights for reusable ballistic space-planes? Woudn't it get boring even faster, while accomplishing even less than an orbital flight? And after all, if private it might not even be for us to share the view, unless we pay a lot.

I remember a US project (in the 80's) involving a B747 with a SSME on its rear, taking a spaceplane piggy-back to almost the speed of sound, releasing it and the spaceplane went to orbit with 4 astronauts. As I don't remember its name, I can't google on it, but it seemed attractive. The spaceplane was completely reusable.

Private citizens with a Soyuz-like capsule...Well, still; will that go far?

The Shuttle with its limited uses?

A manned spaceflight to Mars? But then, forgetting anything else but oen 3 year long flight to Mars.for a very little number of humans.

The capsules have this advantage: they allow for lots of flexibility: long durationflight, different orbit, interplanetary trajectory.

The thing is: how to get astronauts into space, cost effectiviely, and do interesting things up there? But then, what does "interesting" mean, exactly? We all have different opinions about it.

AFAIK, Apollo 15, 16 and 17 were greatest manned spaceflights ever.
But strangely, those flights are often the least commented in books about the Apollo program. Even Thomas Kelly's Moon Lander doesn't mention a lot about those flights. My reason is that those flights were manned, with fascinating alien landscapes and they brought back a huge amount of scientifIc data.
Ok, there are the HS repair missions that are as fascinating, but the telescope could have been built not to be serviced or robots could have done the job.

Raoul