That is what I mentioned earlier. A much smaller version of the space shuttle that has just enough room on it for the atronauts. Leave the heavy lifting up to the unmanned rockets. Make the pilots chauffeurs instead of truck dtivers.
Personally, I think this is a great plan. Perhaps the US needs a new fleet of heavy-lift rockets to get large payloads into space. Look at the "Progress" module (I think the Russians call it) -- it remotely docks with the ISS. They don't even need astronauts to maneuver and "drive" this cargo vessel around. Some at NASA have suggested perpetually orbiting "space trucks" that are similar, I guess, to train engines that move boxcars around a rail yard. These could be piloted by astronauts to move large pre-fabricated space material into proper orbit, or to add to the construction of the space station. Why not make the space station the platform for all our space commerce? Expand it; add a "wing" as a base for astronauts to embark on other orbital missions, but ferrying them into and out of orbit should be by a simple (relatively speaking) space plane, something like Dyna-Soar.
This would require a major increase in NASA's budget, but frankly, I think the space program is one of the very few things the federal government does that is actually worth spending money on.