Back to the drawing board, please!

I am getting quite nervous about the plight of Discovery currently orbiting in space. It is really a shame that NASA has stuck to a technology which is primitive in many aspects. Firing a space vehicle on top of three huge explosive cylinders, all of them to be discarded into sea! It was a fascinating method twenty five years ago-- not any more. Not only it is inefficient, but it is highly risky as the last the two space disasters have shown. (Statistically, now there is 14% probability of a shuttle disaster!). The Russians have been sending cosmonauts to space for years without any of these cylinders, and foam blocks scattering around. Instead of redesigning the whole methodology, NASA has been doing patchwork since the Challenger disaster in 1985. After the 2003 disaster due to loose tiles, they have now come up with a technique of inspection in space and repair. The only problem is that it is an extremely dangerous procedure to repair in space. An accidental bump by the astronaut to the space vehicle will cause irreparable damage that there will be no question of trying a re-entry! Aren’t there some unemployed Russian space engineers we can hire? Or has the whole thing become so political (with the business interests of hundreds of contractors) that nobody wants to consider something drastically different??