With Atlantis's touchdown on Thursday bringing down the final curtain on the space shuttle programme, there is much hand-wringing over the end of an era. For the first time in 30 years Nasa has no immediate programme for human space travel in place. While many are mourning this loss, the last flight of the space shuttle instead provides an opportunity to rethink space exploration and a time to cut our losses from a failed programme that has been a colossal waste of resources, time and creative energy.

The space shuttle failed to live up to its primary goal of providing relatively cheap and efficient human space travel. There is a good reason for this. As the engineers made it clear to the physicist Richard Feynman when he was investigating the cause of the Challenger explosion, human space travel is risky. While Nasa managers had estimated the odds of a shuttle disaster to be microscopic, engineers estimated the loss rate at about 1 in 100 flights, which is close to the actual disaster rate.

Not only has the shuttle programme been costly, it has been boring. A generation that grew up with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey had hoped that by the dawn of the new millennium we would be regularly vacationing in space, and routinely sending astronauts to boldly go where no man or woman had gone before.

Instead we were treated to regular images of the shuttle visiting a $100bn boondoggle orbiting in space closer to Earth than Washington DC is to New York. No one except a billionaire or two has ever vacationed in space, and their "hotel" was a cramped, stuffy and at times smelly white elephant.

Either aboard the shuttle or the International Space Station, astronauts have explicitly demonstrated that what we learn from sending people into space is not much more than how people can survive in space. The lion's share of costs associated with sending humans into space is devoted, as it should be, to making sure they survive the voyage. No other significant science has been learned by a generation's worth of round trips in near-earth orbit.

Yes, there have been highlights, such as the Hubble Space Telescope launch and repair missions, which were not only exciting but useful. However, the real question is whether they were necessary to achieve the science goals. The initial HST repair mission was required because of poor engineering on the ground, which may even have resulted from the daunting requirement of creating a device that had to be designed to be deployed from the space shuttle.

And given the $5bn or so price tag per year associated with the shuttle (leading to cost estimates ranging between $500m and $1.3bn per launch) compared with the total cost of, say $5-7bn over more than a decade for the James Webb Space Telescope, one wonders – as my colleague Robert Parks has mused – whether it would have cost less and been more efficient to merely send up another Hubble (on an unmanned rocket) instead of sending an expensive crew ship to repair the old one.

Helping construct the International Space Station has been no serious justification for the shuttle programme. A largely useless international make-work project that was criticised by every major science organisation in the US, all that can be said for its scientific justification is that it now houses a $2bn particle physics experiment (the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) that managed to avoid serious scientific peer review during its development, otherwise it certainly would not have been recommended for funding.

The real science done by Nasa has not involved humans. We have sent robots to places humans could never have survived and peered into the far depths of the cosmos, back to the early moments of the big bang, with instruments far more capable than our human senses, all for a fraction of what it costs to send a living, breathing person into Earth's orbit. The first rovers went to Mars for what it would cost to make a movie about sending Bruce Willis to Mars.

But science is not the real goal of human space travel. As I argued over a decade ago to the House Science Committee when Buzz Aldrin and I were asked to testify before their subcommittee on space exploration, we send humans into space for adventure. Astronauts inspire us by their courage and skill, and not least by the fact that they risk death every time they step into a spacecraft.

I personally have no problems with this fact. I believe the future of the human species will eventually be in space, and that we will one day colonise other planets. But we have to be honest about this goal.

I have been on stage with astronauts and watched how they inspire kids to dream big dreams. Indeed, I myself stayed home from school during every Apollo moon mission, and dreamed of one day walking on the moon myself.

Did those missions encourage me to become a scientist, or was I interested in them because of a pre-existing fascination with the cosmos? It is hard to say. But the inspiration associated with tackling problems as immense as those associated with sending humans away from their natural environment into the hostile reaches of space has ultimately produced a host of scientists and engineers who might otherwise have pursued other careers.

If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on human space travel, however, we need to have a rational plan, and one that can excite the imagination of the next generation of would-be scientists and explorers. The space shuttle did not provide such a plan.

As Richard Feynman himself said in his final report on the Challenger disaster: "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Lawrence M Krauss is foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the author of books including The Physics of Star Trek. His most recent book, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, was published in March