People like Shelby also made NASA what it is. Remember that the whole Apollo thing was about national prestige. That's why it shut down as soon as it served that purpose; the West won the race to the Moon and that was the end of that. The Apollo program set up the pork infrastructure, and politicians have been milking it ever since. They know nothing about spaceflight, have no interest in doing anything off planet (there are no voters out there), and spaceflight is just a convenient way to add some jobs for their constituents. (I wonder how many national endeavors fall into that same pattern)
Apollo should never have happened. Spaceflight should have been an organic thing, building up capabilities as there was clear return on investment. That's what capitalism is supposed to be good at - allocation of resources. If there's no return for a society by going to space, it won't be pursued. It is the involvement of politicians like Shelby that so often messes things up because their priorities are political.
SpaceX and Blue Origin are capitalist anomalies. They exist because of a couple of breathtakingly-wealthy and determined men are interested in spaceflight. It's entirely possible that this is another round of premature spaceflight because of how artificial the whole situation is. It'll probably take decades before the world will find out if this approach has legs.
