The shuttle is a magnificent machine and the crew a brave and capable bunch. I sure hope the craft is fine and I suspect it will be from what we know so far.
Assuming everything is fine, the crew can get down to the important work of making those new drugs and those perfect space ball bearings we've been promised for years.
Really, until we come up with some totally new type of propulsion (and I don't mean solar sails or tiny nuclear explosions), getting to orbit will be too expensive and hard and traveling any real distance in space will take way too long. Shooting fire out of a ships tail is old news and is way too self limiting. It's like the universe is built to discourage any real travel in space. It's not that we are at the beginning of a long period of research that will lead to our being able to do something worthwile in space - in fact, we really don't have a clue as to how to move to a much better level of capability.
And don't get me started on these private companys that promise to be so much more "efficent" than NASA. In reality, their only contribution to space exploration is likely to be ferrying a few well to do folks on a siteseeing trip. For now, space is a dead end except for putting up cameras, telescopes and audio/video relay stations.
I agree.