Mission failure rate significantly decreased by wearing a life vest. 
You don’t seem to grasp the basic statistics of the issue. The STS program has had nearly four times as many missions as all other American space vehicles combined. That means there is (roughly) to an exponent of 3.82 more likely for a failure to have occurred during the STS program as on the other programs combined, even assuming the same overall reliability of the vehicle.
As for the design flaws of the STS, these are known quantities, certainly, but in fact actually failures of the Shuttle system have fallen well within the technical estimates of overall system reliability by the original system designers, who estimated that a problem would occur resulting in catastrophic failure between 1:50 and 1:100 flights. The Solid Rocket Boosters and Shuttle Main Engines are actually some of the most reliable rocket propulsion systems ever flown based upon flight history. On the other hand, Project Mercury suffered on hair-raising flight anomoly after another until Mercury 8. Gemini 3 and 8 both suffered stuck retrothrusters that could have threatened both the mission and the crew, and the modified Titan demonstrated significant POGOing during certain flight regimes. Apollo was even worse; both the S-IC and the S-II suffered POGO effects that resulted in premature engine shutdown on several occasions and reached levels that could have threatened propulsive and structural failure. This is the same type of effect that caused the Soviet N-1 rocket to come apart like a cheap gold watch.
Curiously, you miss or gloss over the most glaring flaw in the STS design, that being the lack of a viable abort mode prior to SRB burnout. While capsule based-systems uniformily have some kind of nose-puller rocket that allows for viable abort modes from on-pad separation through Stage I burn, and then on until orbit. While it is unlikely that the crew of the Challenger could have manually actuated an escape system, the fact is that even if the Orbiter had been able to cleanly separate from the SRBs it still would not have been able to land safetly in a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort mode.
As far as acceptance of a failure rate of 1%, that just doesn’t fit with the public perception. People were told and have come to expect that the Shuttle is just a space truck, and the risk of riding in it is not dissimilar to hopping on the bus to go downtown.
Stranger
Anyone who believed that is an idiot, though, as are the people who told them that.
I’ll second this. But it won’t be cheap, at this time of massive deficits, and I have a nagging suspicion that the U.S. public and elected officials won’t have the determination to see it through, barring some Sputnik-type incident (perhaps with the Chinese) to get people fired up.
I think it’s entirely possible that the first person to walk on Mars is already alive today. But I think that’s as far as biological humans will go.
We will go much,much further, but not before we develop some sort of machine intelligence that can thrive in space.
I don’t think a Sputnik-type incident is possible today; we know too much. Remember, people were mostly freaked out by Sputnik because they thought it meant the Russians could attack the US from orbit, not simply because it showed that Russian rocketry was more advanced.
We landed on the moon 40 years ago. It’s a national disgrace that we do not have a functional moon base today.
I would really like to say yes to the question, but it’s hard to. If we can get Congress to adequately fund NASA and then stop screwing with their budget, we can do it. Fat chance of that happening…
I’d wager not in my lifetime (I’m 34). Or my son’s, who is 2.
There has to be some specific payoff for this to become a priority, and I can’t imagine what it is. For the moon it was a national pride thing, with the added benefit to explore lunar geology and composition, which provided a lot of benefits in terms of our core knowledge of the solar system (IMHO worth it)
But there’s been a bit of a paradigm shift - back in the 60s we did not have the level of automation or robotic technology to adequately explore the lunar surface.
We do now, and unmanned missions are considerably cheaper and less risky, and provide the same benefit (aside from the national pride thing).