By the mid-seventies, Nasa was run by astronauts wanting rides, not by scientists exploring space. After the Challenger disaster, astronauts resigned quickly because their hopes of a ride were gone for the foreseeable future. We will see something similar shortly.
If Nasa can't get back to focusing on exploration, instead of providing ponies for jockeys, I say shut it down completely.
Robotics have emerged by leaps and bounds--little cameras will make openheart surgery no longer open heart. If cameras can crawl around your body, why can't they crawl around Mars? We could send them to Mars by the dozens for what it costs to send John Glenn on a sentimental Shuttle journey. If we got these out of work IT engineers reeducated, the technical problems could be solved. THINK of the spinoffs! Right now, the ISS does experiments about the level of a high school science fair. Maintain the ISS as a future docking point for sending masses of unmanned craft into the solar system. So what if most of them fail? It'll still be cheaper than these pointless joyrides.