Myasishchev VM-T heavy transport aircraft - photo

[mwmkravchenko]

only because the USA space program was allowed to stagnate.
The old sky lab should have never been allowed to reenter the atmosphere, it should have been boosted to a high lunar orbit for future use.
Half of the shuttles could have been retired docked or tethered to the ISS or parked in a slightly higher orbit where orbital decay would require less fuel or corrections to keep them up there. Someday they are going to figure out that a lot of the obsolete stuff up there will be more valuable by already being there than boosting other materials to space

Sure go ahead and make sense! The entire problem is that the U.S. space industries are white elephants except SpaceX. Why think forward and economically when you can spend billions to make new ones?

As for Old technology. If it doesn't break, why fix? Old technology includes far more efficient rockets as well. You are the last guy to ever need to tell that old is not a problem. Boeing's latest space capsule is a great example of bouncing baby teething problems. The entire ISS is a Soviet design licensed by the Americans. The Soviets had the most experience hands down on long term engineering for space applications.

Skylab was a great idea that was scuttled for political reasons. As were the two fully designed single stage to orbit systems that were mothballed. All about politics and money. Not about what works.