...usually means the status quo is maintained. I think your dream end-state would be as stagnant as the reality. Real issue is the utter lack of a high-volume market for orbital access - handcrafted, low-mass commercial satellites really can't support a vigorous space-economy. Big muthaf***ing GEO SPS industry could, but the PV/power-distribution/power-transmission technology is still too heavy (40 years after Glaser) to make it viable.

Consider: the STS could've launched payload for the promised $750/kg if the Shuttles had launched 5 times a month - but we know the SRBs and TPS were both too time-intensive to really allow that. Even if they had quicker turn-around what was going to be launched into LEO to fill an 1800 ton a year cargo manifest? There was nothing on the actual books, nothing really budgeted, just a load of paper-studies that achieved sweet f*** all!

A von Braun style program would've needed such a cargo manifest -

a 100 person Space Base in LEO

a 24 person GEO station

a 24 person Moon Lab in orbit

a 48 person Moon Base on the ground

a 24 person Mars Lab in orbit

a 48 person Mars Base on the ground...

so about 270 people in space continually, which would've meant Saturn 250 ton cargo launches every month to fuel Nuclear and chemical OTVs and Shuttle launches for personnel and their consumables. The infrastructure for that program, set up by 1985, could have given more realistic estimates for achieving SPS in the 1990s. And it might've diverted money into Russia's program instead of into the nuclear build-up that strangled the Soviets (not an altogether bad thing that, but what might've been...)

But instead we got the 1970s and whole load of wasted dollars on Vietnam and the Oil Crises, as well as hobbling the Nuclear Industry with once-through fuel cycles.