“In 50 years NASA never did anything like that. But hey when it’s tax money just destroy every booster, every launch... you can just make a new one.”
Well, I am as big a critic of the space shuttle as anyone, but let’s be fair. It is only recently that the control and positioning systems required for this trick became available cheaply enough and small enough to make it practical. That said, the space shuttle was nothing but a boondoggle which only served to show how stupid it is to build a spacecraft that looks like an airplane just to gain some level of reusability. OTOH, I think what NASA has done with unmanned probes is nothing short of amazing.
The technology to do this probably would have been invented sooner if they had tried.