"If not for Russia the ISS would be in a useful orbit, and if not for the ISS treaty NASA could shut it down, scrap the Shuttle now and move on instead of spending billions (probably far more the ESA and Russia together have spent on it since day one...) to return the Shuttle to flight to finish it."

If the station had not gone through, the shuttle would have been shut down, along with the rest of the manned side of NASA. I know this is hard for most here to accept, but there really isn't that much public demand for manned flight to Mars.

Without Russia, the station would have gone down.
(in point of fact there was a one vote margin.)

PRIOR to Russian involvement and the redesign and changes in orbital inclination, the US had already entered into agreements with Japan and the EU, and those governments had already committed funds. At some point the shuttle would have failed...

The shuttle and the US were on the EU and Japan's critical path from those first agreements.

While the Mars enthusiasts think that Mars can be done cheap, my guess is that in the future all manned space flight will have to be done as international projects, simply because of the cost.

Griffin's current go it alone manned Mars architecture appears to be crashing. The first statement out from the Mars Society was a plea for public support, but it appears there is simply not suffficient public support for the Zubrin lite version of manned Mars flight to have the moneys passed. They haven't even mentioned the space nuclear reactors yet.

It will be a chaotic period. Hutchinson has already proposed to keep the shuttle flying and complete the station. My thinking for the last 7 years has been that CAPS might be the only manned mission which the public might support - as thing get tough, perhaps NASA will finally discover it.

While both the shuttle and the station are seriously flawed designs, you have to go back to the periods in which those designs were adopted to understand how they came about.

ep