Lol!
I'd ride that rocket on a 50/50 chance too!
Orbiting 1,075 miles above the Earth, a 250 foot wide, inflated, reinforced nylon "wheel"...Looks more like Bigelow than NASA!
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I have to agree with Jaysun on the waste. Where is the big wheel with cintrepital gravity allowing for coninuous habitation? Where are the Lunar colonies? These things could be done. These would be real steps into space. What we have is an outrageously expensive low-Earth-orbit program reduced to bragging about zero G high school science fair projects.
I have watched the Shuttle take off, and I have had the fortune to see it come in over West Texas pre-dawn. Spectacular, the latter more so than the launch. Compared to a Saturn V launch...well, ya had to be there.
More than any other factor, the Saturn V was still on the optimistic, we are going there curve. The Shuttle is now on the "let's hold on to our jobs" curve. None of the Apollo astronauts would have believed me if I had told them then that 35 years later we would never have gone to the moon again. I will always remember where I was when Armstrong (sliightly) flubbed his lines. Can you remember with that vivedness any shuttle cruise that did not result in death?
The Shuttle program has racked up a one in fifty fatality rate. We would regard this as unacceptable for fighter pilots on combat missions, I believe the rate there is 2 orders of magnitude better.
I will say this: if I were offered a chance to go up and told my chance of returning alive was 50/50, it would require physical restraint to keep me off that flying bomb.