I bet they would had the Obama administration not moved to privatize spaceflight -Did you miss the part I said about capitalism and privatized space flight in an earlier comment?

[–] Morphit@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago

Ah yes, the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle. NASA's plan was to put the Orion spacecraft on top of a Space Shuttle SRB. The projected development costs were $40 billion in 2009 and it was anticipated to cost about $1 billion per flight beyond that. Despite continued development, to this day, Orion still hasn't flown a crew. An SRB was what killed the 7 crew aboard the Challenger.

This was a pretty dumb idea, driven primarily by wanting to keep funding going to the same districts as in the Shuttle era. No one misses that system.

Thinking that wasn't capitalism is ridiculous - NASA designed the system and gave aerospace contractors (read - Boeing) a blank cheque to build it. The contractors of course used that money to lobby congress to spend even more money. Did you miss that part?