The orbital space plane was the next idea. It would transport a crew of 4 to the station and back. The trouble was it used EELV and Congress gave little funding. The EELV don’t use the shuttle’s workforce. Then the shuttle program literally fell to pieces on the ground with Columbia. Soyuz was the only way to the station for two years.

When the shuttle came back online it was realized that the thing needed to be retired. It still couldn’t function as lifeboat but even transporting crew could be problematic because the shuttle transported cargo. If the cargo was delayed, so too could be the crew transfer. They decided to let the shuttle focus on building the station and put the crew on Soyuz.

Orion on top of Ares-1 was next but again over budget and late. It likely would not have been ready till 2017 at the soonest and even then there would be no station to go to as the plan was to cancel the ISS in 2015 to focus on the moon program. However with no station to go to Orion was useless because the Ares V wouldn’t be ready till the 2020ies. The ISS was extended to 2024,constellation was canceled. Orion was offered as a lifeboat as a bone to Congress, but they didn’t go for it. It is just as well considering that the current version of Orion is too heavy to its parachutes (if loaded with a crew and supplies) and has proven too heavy for the cables they wanted to use to tie it down in the recovery ship.

Currently the Commercial Crew Craft are going after the role of transport and lifeboat despite a hostile Congress that does not want to fund them properly (because they don’t supply enough money to the right districts). And there isn’t enough money in the budget to do the job in an reasonable amount of time if you did use the Shuttle’s former workforce. They still haven’t worked on Orion’s life support system!

..and still receive applause from Griffinikov and company.

but ofc this was just the opening round: the real issue is the block buy, not violation of sanctions.

as to griffin and collins laughing it up: “oink oink”, the pigs are heading back to the trough…

I blame amightywind. I realized I agreed with him about the use of the RD-180 on DoD launchers. Not so much because they were Russian but because the weren’t American.

A couple of hundred million will be spent on studying stuff about engines. Or studying studies. Or studying the right pot plants for the admin building for the project to studying building an engine.

Too much invested in the status quo….