Beautiful picture! It’s a shame that the politics of today overwhelm it...
Until we’re able to supersede chemical propulsion systems, our best option for increasing the amount of human spaceflight (and we’ll have to have a much larger presence in space if we expect to, for example, reach, explore, and colonize Mars) is to use the materials already up there in the asteroids to produce shuttle-type reentry vehicles, built of nice sturdy lightweight metallic foam, and coated with ablative shielding, then loaded with (for example) processed precious metals from the same sources, and surfed down unmanned for unloading and recycling.