http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030924/5528189s.htm

Excerpt:
"The members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation made no comments during the hearing about what is probably the most damning section in the recently released Columbia accident report -- and for good political reasons. Had they brought it up, it would have revealed Congress' own culpability in the failure of the United States' space program during the past two decades. The report described how, since the 1980s, nearly $5 billion -- practically as much as it cost to build the original shuttle fleet -- had been wasted in an effort to build some form of shuttle replacement. None of the programs NASA started -- and that Congress had approved -- ever got off the ground. Most of the programs never even built usable hardware. Each failure makes a strong case for turning to private enterprise... During the same years that NASA was wasting a fortune, a handful of new American rocket companies struggled to finance their own reusable launch systems. Two companies built hardware; one, Rotary, actually completed several manned test flights. Their designs were lean and mean; their estimated combined construction costs were about the same as what NASA had spent on blueprints. When the commercial launch industry went bust and their sources of venture capital went dry, these firms offered their services to NASA as cheap shuttle alternatives. But NASA was not interested. Funding these upstart and independent projects would have meant siphoning money from NASA's bloated bureaucracy. The companies went bankrupt, and no new launch system was ever completed."