Majivo wrote:
It's a work in progress, though. We need to know more about how the human body reacts to spacelike conditions, which is one of the goals of the ISS. In a lot of ways it's a stepping stone towards reproducing a similar facility in lunar conditions.
In the meantime, we could be working on our roadmap though. But so far, no one's even talking about it. What I mean is this:
We split our focus for manned spaceflight into two areas:
1. Vehicles for getting payloads (including people) from the surface to the ISS (and back) in as cost effective and safe manner possible. Design this so that *everything* we move into space uses this system.
2. Vehicles for moving payloads around in space. Specifically, this should be something which can be assembled in space, is re-usable, and can hold numerous modular configurations depending on the specific mission.
Do this properly, and you gain the same capabilities we previously used the space shuttle for, but at a fraction of the total cost. The shuttle was the "one vehicle to do it all" system, while this breaks it into multiple pieces. It's trivially easy to make a vehicle capable of space travel if it never has to travel to or from the surface of a planet. The structural requirements (and therefore weight) are much lower, allowing for much more efficient travel. Properly designed, you could use such a craft for anything from retrieving or repairing satellites, to trips to and from the moon.
The "roadmap" aspect to this is that we gain the knowledge of how to assemble things in space. That's critical IMO for future missions farther out. If we can assemble small craft for near Earth travel, we can connect them together (lots of design possibilities) to make larger craft capable of interstellar travel (ie: to Mars and back). By building them in this manner we can test them out instead of the "shot" approach NASA tends to use. By designing them to be reusable from the start, we create cost savings. Modular design should be an obvious approach, but I've yet to see anyone seriously suggest it (or at least not heard about any such suggestions).
There are lots of ways to approach this, but there are steps we can take in the meantime that add significant value in the long term and would realistically cost us little in the short term. The only negative is that there's no definable end point, so it doesn't seem to fit into the NASA model for missions. It's as much about the culture of our space program as anything else.