Missions could see NASA spacecraft heading to Uranus and Neptune

Really... nobody is going to mention the last sentence? [rolls eyes]

Why did the US give up all their airplane manufacturing capabilities to private companies?

I can't in good faith upvote a story on a website that has more junk advertisement then content per character and has stories like "VOYAGER 2 MAY HAVE BEEN HACKED AS IT ENTERED DEEP SPACE" featured next to this.

Well, you wondered,

"I don't really care what their goal would be, as long as it would be a goal that they could work towards..."

and that link shows the basic four orienting science questions (right panel in blue text) - how did life begin, how did the solar system evolve, how did the planets originate, etc.

Those are the top-level questions that the National Academies panel doing the Decadal Survey arrived at and that motivates the portfolio of planetary missions that are planned. I would have linked to the Decadal Survey (overview at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Science_Decadal_Surv...), but the report itself is a very long pdf - and this gets into the strategy in detail.

For instance, the next Mars mission (Mars 2020) is set up to address the "life" question, and the "how did the planet [Mars] evolve" question, etc.

Do you know what the Uranus probe's goals are? They're laid out here [1]. It's to measure wind speed and atmospheric densities/temperatures. And that is typical. This is what I was getting at when I said that these probes do not achieve near what many people seem to think they can. We have a limited budget and I think this budget should be directed towards things that can advance us in the most meaningful ways possible. Measuring the wind speed and density on Uranus does not really fit the bill there.

Think about SpaceX. What they've done should have been impossible. A private company operating on a shoestring budget revolutionized space in 15 years? That doesn't mean Musk is a genius, it means that our current space system is simply incompetent. There are certainly many reasons for this, including congress using NASA as a jobs program, but I think a lack of direction is also a major reason. 'Discovering how life began and evolved on Earth' as a mission statement is like a philsopher stating his goal is to 'discover the meaning of existence.' It's a goal that's so impossible and so broad that anything can be justified in its name.

'Easier' goals are in many ways much harder since you need to remain focused. And when NASA has focus they, at least in the past, have shown themselves capable of amazing things. Going from having never even put a man in orbit, to putting a man on the moon in a decade? Think about that, if you even can. In today's times that should seem completely unbelievable. And we should be capable of exponentially more now a days. And that is where we should set our sights. The point I'm getting at is that if you aim low, that's always where you're going to hit. Aim high and you might miss, but at least you're pointed in the right direction.

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As one brief aside, those mission statements immediately made me think of Oumuamua [2] -- that cylindrical weird interstellar object (it's exact nature is, and will likely remain unknown - the name translates to 'first scout', as the imagination might imagine) currently looping around the sun on its pass through and on its way out of our solar system. Being able to get ships and ideally humans onto that thing would be groundbreaking and actually go a long ways towards pushing those mission statements, abstract though they may be, forward. But our space program and technology is so backwards and dated that we're instead left watching jaws agape as arguably the single most relevant tracked celestial object lackadaisically (...as lackadaisical as 30km/s can be) laps us on its way on out of our solar system. It's again absurd that the primary interest in trying to perform an intercept with this object has come from the private industry. But hey, at least we'll know the wind speed in Uranus...

[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua