Why did they stop the space program?

Answer 1

They didn't; the "space program" includes a lot of stuff besides the space shuttle, and most of the other stuff is still continuing.

The Shuttle first flew in 1981, 30 years ago. Do you still drive a 30-year-old car? It's time for something new.

One of the problems has been that NASA has stopped being a SPACE program, and is little more than a PORK program. There are 435 different congressional districts in the United States, and parts for the shuttle are built in almost 400 of them. There's too much in the way of "pork barrel" spending (a term that applies to spending money wastefully) and too little in the way of actual research. The recently-cancelled Constellation program is based on 20-year-old designs, doesn't utilize new technology, and focuses more on keeping all of the existing NASA engineers employed, rather than actually flying missions.

Robot probes are still being built, and launched, and instead of having one enormous soviet-styled manned space program, there are a half-dozen different PRIVATE space programs. SpaceX, ArianeSpace, Dragon, Scaled Composites; the list goes on.

In 1903, in a massively-funded government development program, the US tried to build a heavier-than-air flying machine. Professor Samuel Langley failed, and his aircraft crashed into the Potomac River on December 8, 1903. On December 17, 1903, two bicycle makers named Wilbur and Orville Wright succeeded where the government had failed. It's happening again.