It's amazing how things move only through adversity.

Kennedy could offer the Moon because Kruschev challenged the US.

The Apollo missions evolved very quickly to a moonlanding thanks to all the improvements made after the Apollo 1 fire.

Endeavour was built on time and under budget because the US was traumatized by the Challenger accident.

But when Shuttle flights were taking place, very little comments were going on about the missions. Instead, we'd hear NASA is not going anywhere but around and around and around.

During the Moon missions the public also got blasé and that's what stopped the adventure. I myself remember not being too upset for not having seen Apollo 17's moonwalks live as they took place while we were asleep.

Now, there's another accident.
Will something constructive come out of it? For the moment, it's still the blame game.

It's hardly going to get the manned program back on track.

NASA wanted, with the Shuttle, precisely to do routine flights, flights that wouldn't attract the public's attention. It was that way going to loose the public's support. OTOH, if every flight must be a level higher in some way than the previous one, NASA would be accused of merely doing stunt missions.
Going further, faster, longer than any previous flight is possible with a crew of 2 in a solar orbit, possibly even flying by Venus and Mars and an asteroid before going back to Earth; That would be great for science (studying how humans cope with radiation and remoteness from Earth) and if the crew could at given moments, send a laser beam towards Earth, amateurs with telescopes aimed at the precise expected direction could catch a flare or a flash from millions of miles. That would be awe inspiring.
Unfortunately, presidents, congressmen and aerospace companies have very different agendas.
Human nature makes us appreciate those things in very different ways.
Is one of them still aimed at inspiring us and can this tragedy wake it up?
I wonder.

Raoul