I always wondered why NASA was funding shuttle replacements when they were not eager (or willing?) to replace the shuttle. This reason makes sense, and NASA’s effort had the effect of distracting, discouraging, and destroying companies (and their investors) that were eager to muscle in on NASA’s near monopoly of space access.

This is the excitement I had hoped to be involved in during my career. I will have to settle for watching it happen during my retirement.

I disagree that we got nothing from the Constellation program, as we ended up with Orion, which is expensive and is probably suitable for its original mission. Unfortunately it no longer has a mission, so the chances are poor that it will be suitable for whatever it is assigned to when it is complete. Should it be assigned to a mission. Well, OK … maybe we really did get nothing from Constellation after all, and we are throwing desperately needed money after badly spent money. :-(

I like your description of the history of the 1990s. “In the 1990s there were a whole bunch of private companies trying to build reusable spaceships, rocket ships of all kinds. They were doing it because there was a predicted demand for launch services.” However, I think that a more root causal reason that they started their own companies was that they gave up on the government creating the space adventure that Kubrick and Clark showed us in their movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” and wanted to get it done, even if they had to do it themselves. Elon Musk created SpaceX because he wants to go to Mars and obviously has no faith that a government program would get him there. These and other entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to make money while preparing to settle the solar system.

That’s not why it failed – indeed, I’m not sure you can call it a failure given it has served NASA’s primary purpose for it..to discredit RLV’s, SSTO, and commercializing space.

Your example was a bit off. After all, by the late ’90’s NASA had already turned down offers from all the big areo firms to build replacements for the shuttle, that:
– had all the shuttles on orbit abilities
– were at least 10 times cheaper to operate
– that they would build out of pocket with no NASA funding
Which NASA refused out of hand, and paid L/M a billion extra in the X-33 contract to not work toward.

So if they were not going to take the big aero firms cheaper, better offer in the mid ’90’s – why would they be interested in the NewSpace folks less interesting and less economical proposals in the late ’90’s?