China is the only other entity besides the U.S. and Russia with a human spaceflight capability.
"Robotics has advanced at the pace people thought human spaceflight would advance, " he said.
China, on the other hand, has a relatively mature human spaceflight program that is nearly a decade old.
Yet after the moon missions in the 1960s, NASA was never funded to follow its ambitious vision for human spaceflight.
Human spaceflight is an optional programme for Esa member states, and so far the UK has declined to invest in it.
The British Interplanetary Society is making the award to recognise the astronauts' achievements but also to further the case for human spaceflight.
"Today's final launch of Endeavour is a testament to American ingenuity and leadership in human spaceflight, " Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.
He repeated his criticisms of the current direction of the US human spaceflight programme, saying it lacked ambition compared with the big thinking of the 1960s.
This latter point was emphasised by Leicester University astrophysicist Duncan Law-Green, who believes the UK is well placed to exploit the new private ventures opening up in human spaceflight.
This week, a panel convened by the White House to review human spaceflight plans said the rocket programme was not viable under the US space agency's present funding.
Having spent so many years trying to further the UK's involvement in programmes of human spaceflight it is great to see things finally moving in the right direction.
The reason why, unfortunately, is that it may signal the end of the road for one of the greatest technological achievements of modern times, the U.S. human spaceflight program.
"These contracts represent important progress in restoring human spaceflight capabilities to the United States, " said Phil McAlister, director of the Commercial Spaceflight Development Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
ENGADGET: NASA awards Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada $30 million in contracts
Nasa is attempting to offload routine human spaceflight operations in low-Earth orbit to commercial industry in a way similar to how some large organisations contract out their IT or payroll.
By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding.
"Today's event is a strong reminder of why we need continuous efforts to survey and identify near-Earth objects, " said Thomas Reiter, European Space Agency's Director of Human Spaceflight and Operations.
The White House's chief scientist, John Holdren, said "it would be only prudent" to review the human spaceflight programme given the scale of its ambition and "the significant investment of both funds and scientific capital".
At present, British government policy specifically bars any public programmes connected with human spaceflight, and it has directed that any monies instead go towards the robotic exploration of space - for example in Earth observation and unmanned planetary probes.
One of the major findings of the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee, appointed by the White House, was that the international framework of cooperation for the ISS was one of the major successes of the program.
Ultimately, though, there's only so much you can do to fine-tune a 20-year-old design, and one that was originally envisaged - let's not forget - to launch astronauts, with all the extra assurance and cost that human spaceflight entails.
"The government has to understand that the costs of human spaceflight are far outweighed by the benefits - the benefits of inspiration and of exploration, " said Nick Spall, a BIS fellow and co-ordinator of the UK Human Spaceflight Campaign.
Others argue that the administration is simply not committed to human spaceflight and wants to do other things with its money, and that the composition of the review panel indicates that it is merely intended to divert political flak.
Although the scope of Mr Augustine's latest review does not allow for such an explicit conclusion this time, it would still be able to place more emphasis on private-sector human spaceflight and demand more unmanned missions to the moon.
It is also grappling with a big cost overrun on another of its top priorities - the James Webb Space Telescope - and for which the shortfall will have to be picked up by programmes across the agency, perhaps even human spaceflight.
In 2009, Ms. Ride was a member of the Augustine Committee, appointed by President Obama to make recommendations on the future of NASA's human-spaceflight programs.
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