[altair]

The shuttle is already cost ineffective at putting things into orbit. Adding the kinds of emergency supplies you suggest would only make the problem worse. For example, with the same money we used with the shuttle to get the Hubble space telescope functional, we could have built and launched (unmanned) three new ones.

[Doohickey]

False. The initial HST cost 1.5 billion. It costs about 470 million to launch a shuttle.

[capitan_refugio]

Call me "retro," but for the Space Station we should go back and use 1960's technology - the Saturn V. It had about 4x the lifting capacity of the Shuttle and never had a failure. We would have to build several new V's (the last one is on display, I think, the three or four from the cancelled Apollo missions were used for Apollo/Soyuz and the Skylab missions, I think).