As I see it, there are three problems with space.
First, the present management and methods of "Big Space" are wretchedly bad. There's a very serious lack of competent management and systems engineering. On the other hand, Rutan would face serious difficulties in this realm because he's not set up to handle the sort of huge project that a real manned space system entails. Airplanes -- even his SS1 -- are easy by comparison. I think this, more than anything else, is the primary problem that must be solved and I honestly don't know how one would go about doing so.
Second, Rutan, et al. cannot get us there commercially, because there is no money to be made from it right now. All of the "space mining" ideas and such only make sense if you've already got a bunch of infrastructure already in place, and private industry is not going to put it there -- the horizon for a decent return on investment for infrastructure would be measured in decades, if ever.
And so you need to bring the government into the act. The problem with government "manned space" is that it's not sexy, and will be brutally expensive no matter how efficiently you can shove hardware out the door. It would require a significant and very long-term commitment by Congress ... a rather forlorn hope at this point.
All good points and, again, I concur witht he bulk of them. Rutan probably doesn't have the experience to run the NASA, I only bring him up because he's one of the most prominent of the commercial space travel aspirants.
The costs of space travel are extraordinarily high, we both agree with that. NASA has become a bloated agency that supports bloated supppliers like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. All those bloated organizations add up to bloated budgets.
I also think that the NASA corporate culture is so imbued in process and redundancy that it probably adds 6 months to a year to every launch schedule. The political infrstructure in NASA also probably stifles innovation from the "worker-bees". It doesn't really seem to matter who runs NASA, there seems to be a lot of turf protection and Not-Invented-Here syndrome among the upper mengement of the agency.
It appears to me that the upper echelons of NASA have become somewhat cloistered and isolated from what goes on in Operations. Until those changes are made, I think the NASA will continue to stumble along in an uninspired fashion.