The debate about Moon vs Mars vs asteroid is a false debate; all are versions of Apollo, which was canceled because it was too expensive to have any practical value. The debate about NASA vs private is also meaningless; the Ares, Delta, Atlas, and Shuttle are all built by the team of Boeing and Lockheed (BoLo) while the Falcon is built by SpaceX. They are just different companies working under NASA contracts.
The real debate is whether human spaceflight should utilize expendable vehicles or reusable vehicles. Shuttle and SpaceShip are reusable, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, Shenzhou, Constellation, and SpaceX are expendables.
A friend sent this letter to a government official; it's a start; feel free to improve upon it if you wish. It may or may not have any effect but I think it is worth trying:
Dear Sir/Madam:
I am contacting you because the imminent cancellation of the Space Shuttle program is a serious mistake that will set back the goal of meaningful human spaceflight by decades.
After nearly 30 years, the Space Shuttle is finally flying amazingly well. Its safety, reliability, cost and performance are actually improving with every flight. No objective evidence supports the widespread claim that after 134 missions the Orbiters will suddenly turn into unreliable deathtraps.
Some see Constellation as a rebirth of the Apollo program, but they forget history. Apollo was canceled for a very good reason; human spaceflight with expendable rockets, whether the destination is the moon, an asteroid, or Mars, is much too expensive to provide any practical benefits for our country. The answer isn't to make unsubstantiated claims about the value of human spaceflight. The real answer is exactly the same as it was in 1974. To make humans productive in space we must reduce the cost of getting there, by at least a factor of ten, so that the work we can do in space is actually worth what it costs.
Surprisingly, the energy that gets us into space costs almost nothing. LOX delivered to KSC is about 60 cents a gallon, LH2 about 98 cents. Rocket fuel is actually cheaper than gasoline! The vast majority of the cost for any launch is in building a new vehicle for every mission. Consequently, the only way to significantly reduce the cost of spaceflight is to eliminate the need to assemble a new rocket for every launch. That’s why the Shuttle was built; as a major step toward the goal of making space accessible to a significant part of the human race.
Reusability works. The shuttle costs less per launch than Constellation and carries much more. Its systems have been vastly improved over the years. The last few flights have seen virtually no tile damage, and many maintenance items are still being improved to reduce cost. Bizarrely, the Shuttle is condemned as unreliable just because it has been in service 30 years. This reasoning has no basis whatsoever in reliability engineering. Rigorous engineering studies show that the reliability of launch vehicles, including the shuttle, gets better with time, not worse. The Shuttles are fully inspected and continually updated, and nothing in service or even on the drawing board can match their ability to carry seven crew and 11 tons of cargo to the ISS, plus EVA and RMS capability.
The Shuttle is much more expensive to operate than originally predicted, but this isn't because it is reusable. The problems in operational cost and safety were largely the result of one fundamental error; we had no prototypes to test the Shuttle's critical new technologies in actual repeated spaceflight before the design was finalized. Consequently design decisions were made that, in hindsight, were wrong, and ultimately proved costly in many ways.
Just ten years ago we understood this. NASA was building the X-33, X-34, X-37 and DC-X as prototypes to test critical design elements for a new generation of launch vehicles and spacecraft that would be practical, safe, and fully reusable. Yet all these programs were canceled between 2000 and 2004, not because of technical failures, but apparently due to the failure of NASA management to recognize their importance.
Most tragically, we are about to disperse forever the only workforce in the world that has hands-on experience maintaining reusable spacecraft. Their knowledge cannot be written down and recreated. These are the very people we need to build a successor to the Shuttle, because they know how to avoid its problems in a new design. Moreover, we will lose forever the real lessons of Challenger and Columbia, which are not in the volumes of findings, but in the minds of the people who learned from these tragedies how to do the job right. It is because of them that the Shuttle is safer than it has ever been, and gets safer with every flight.
Within a month demolition of the LC-39B Shuttle launch complex will begin, with the object of preparing the pad for a reinstated Constellation. This will drive a stake into the heart of Shuttle and all reusable spacecraft. Why not delay this irrevocable step? Constellation, which the administration would like to cancel, is continuing to consume a large percentage of our budget. Politically, its main selling point now seems to be that it will create some new jobs to compensate for those that will be lost when the Shuttle is junked. But obviously the best way to mitigate the massive Shuttle job losses that are about to begin is to keep the Shuttle flying until it is replaced by something better.
We made a mistake four years ago, and we are on the wrong path. Before we pass the point of no return, why not allow a real discussion of our goals? The NASA budget is stable. If we discontinue spending on Constellation as President Obama requested, we can certainly afford to continue flying Shuttle as long as we need it, with SpaceX providing backup access to ISS. We can restart the Reusable Launch Vehicle program and use the lessons of Shuttle to make the next generation of human spaceflight practical and safe. Far from being "trapped in LEO", we can use LEO as a base for a deliberate and sustainable expansion into the solar system.
Time is short. We must choose our course. Our goal should not be to make spaceflight a spectacular for a few, but rather to make it a routine destination for many.
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