"There are many lessons to be drawn from the programmatic disaster that is the Shuttle program. Unfortunately, many of the most popular ones are wrong. Alan Boyle has apparently succumbed to one of them, when he writes:"

Rand explains why keeping the cargo and passenger separate isn't where the Shuttle went wrong and isn't THE SOLUTION, or even an important aspect of the problem.

One first could establish whether the Shuttle program was a failure or disaster. For instance as a Job Program it's been fairly successful- hired lots of people and provided employment for decades.
You could take the view that the Shuttle was "understandably" over sold- things like it would provide cheap, safe, routine access to Space. You could say that the Shuttle's main problem was it was underfunded [and obviously the over selling of it could based to the "hope" that it would in fact be fully funded and the underfunding that occurred was "proof" that any over selling was required]. But to others if the Shuttle costs half the money actually spent, flew twice as much, and didn't kill anyone, the Shuttle would still have been a disaster.

I say that from a "programmatic" point of view their wasn't much difference between the Shuttle and Saturn V rocket. The main difference being Saturn V was perhaps a slightly easier task and had a much funding as is vaguely reasonable to expect- "waste anything but time". The Saturn V was given this excessive amount funding because it was directly tied to national security.

Things tied to our national security get funding. And this is the point where some people jump off the cliff: "Right, so we have to *make* space exploration an issue of national security".
Rather than jump off the cliff, I simply would point out that they were both disasters. They were bridges that lead nowhere and had no hope of leading anywhere. There were bridges build high into the sky and abruptly end- and the solution isn't that they needed to be built further.

Having access to space is definitely a matter concerning our national security. Having access to space is vital for any nation on this planet. And the idea that you should deny a nation access to to Space is similar to denying them access to using airplanes, oceanic trade, or electricity. Having access to space is something that should be a national right and even an individual right. Similar to nuclear technology, space technology is potentially dangerous. BUT as we are "discovering" human beings with access to "bomb making technology" are dangerous, and we are apparently discovering the access to fingernail cutters is dangerous. There is much confusion and misguided ideas associated how to deal with this, such as the nanny state mentality, gun control, etc. And we seem to not understand simple things like why you don't feed the bears [and bears compared to human beings are relatively harmless creatures].

I think your view of the Shuttle program depends upon your view of what's really important. If you think the hindering access to space is important or that leaving the trees could been a big mistake, the Shuttle program has done a fair amount to delay the opening the space frontier.