I don't know, in that year I was a space enthusiast in high school but already iffy about human spaceflight going anywhere interesting before I got old. Even if

I don't know, in that year I was a space enthusiast in high school but already iffy about human spaceflight going anywhere interesting before I got old. Even if the disaster was just a tragic bump, the shuttle was already so much worse than promised that no evolution of it plausibly led to the really ambitious programs like O'Neil colonies. (See http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/ http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/ for the kind of thing we got excited about back then. It's a much more compelling vision than going to Mars.) Nowadays there's real private spaceflight in development. Still a long way from asteroid mining and such, but it feels a little closer than it did then.