US governments can't do either very well. NASA got $4 billion a year and couldn't keep the Space Shuttle properly maintained. We had to buy space on Russian rockets for our astronauts. California spent $135 billion so far and has a trackless bridge in the middle of a desert to show for it.
I don't know where you got the idea we were buying Soyuz. What's called the workhorse period was characterized by American astronauts taking Soyuz with the ESA or whoever up to the ISS, "buying a seat". If you find that disagreeable, we should've kept the program going.
In my opinion, it's politics the ended the Space Shuttle program, it did not end because there was anything wrong with it. When you look at who the critics were, it was men like Lawrence Krauss, whose
a theoretical physicist and expert on dark energy, and while he's prestigious in his contributions to academia, they aren't "real world" contributions, and he had long transitioned to be a "science communicator" focused on his Origins project at ASU. He's not an engineer, he has literally no experience in the relevant fields, he had zero authority to call the Space Shuttle program a "death trap"; meanwhile the men who made things work or who piloted experimental aircraft were the ones protesting, and saying how dangerous the "buying a seat" period would be, weakening America. Men like Wayne Hale, an actual Space Shuttle engineer, were of a totally opposed opinion, as were men like Buzz Aldrin and rest of the so-called "Astronaut royalty".
The real reason the Shuttle program was killed is because George Bush Jr. wanted to get Constellation going as a replacement to retire the shuttles in 2010, and then Obama came in, he retired the Shuttles, and killed the Constellation program. The Space Shuttle program was something that was not problematic or unsafe, and the cost of running it
while developing Constellation, were necessary commitments that got raped by thirdworld commie politics equitable to South Africa, backed up by pop-culture faggots claiming to be experts, siding with their black man president. $4 billion a year was a perfectly reasonable figure to do both. We gave Ukraine $300 billion under Biden alone.
The only reason for Lawrence Krauss to have lashed out was to defend Obama. And let's not forget Lawrence Krauss is all over the Epstein files. But you don't have to take my word for it, just go look at the qualifications of the people who were against ending the Space Shuttle program and killing Constellation, and look at the qualifications of the people who supported it.
