“seven years without a human qualified space transportation capability in the U.S.”
I think that’s even worse than the gap between the last Apollo flight (Apollo-Soyuz) and the first Shuttle: 1975-1981.
And no humans are going to climb into an Orion capsule anytime soon.
Nope. Orion will be another gov program: kick out the schedule, re-baseline it, change managers...repeat over and over until the program does a name change to hide the lack of progress.
Contractors love it, they just keep sending those invoices.