Congress stripping the budget away from NASA, effectively reducing the employment roles by over 70%,
and still expecting the work load to be accomplished by only one third of the previous workforce hasn't helped.
The majority of the work still gets put out on bid to the lowest bidder, and they will cut corners to maximize profit.
"Sucess Managment' is a poor substitute for taking the time with the right budget to get it done right.
Remember that the Challenger was launched because the Military was hung up on meeting a 'Schedule',
and 'Sucess Managment' OKed the launch even after the company (Thiokol) that made the boosters refused to sign off on launch safety.
It was outside the envelope of the seal design, there was a known anomaly in the mating of that particular field joint,
and it was known that weather conditions were outside of the thermal restriction envelope.
They launched anyway - under pressure.
'Sucess Managment' reared it's ugly head again with the Columbia. Engineers went to Managment with data about a strike to the vehicle,
seen on TV monitors, and the evaluation was given to a team of new green engineers (on a first job) to evaluate with a 'spread sheet' -
they didn't even get real time data, just a copy of "What If = This Might Happen" to compile a 'Yes' answer for managment.
The request for photograhpy and imaging was denied by managment as not worthy of persuing, they already had a 'Yes'.
There is no budget to develop a replacement for the shuttle, there are some old derivative designs available,
but nothing in the pipeline to replace wah we have with a sutable replacement.
From day one to build a new system would take 10 years before we would ready to launch a new vehicle.
Nothing before 2015 is do-able unless we make another one of what we have, and even that would take at least 5 years to accomplish.
The Shuttle was an old design - even when it was brand new, and bugetary constraints made it worse than it should have been -
compromised by the budget into something that NASA didn't want to begin with, a space truck for the Military.