Whither NASA?

The Space Shuttle is coming to end-of-life. NASA plans to stop operating it this year. This decision had two drivers,
1. The Shuttle is dangerous to fly.
2. The Shuttle is very expensive, even when it doesn't fly.

NASA originally planned to replace the shuttle with a step backwards, to expendable boosters and capsules that re entered by parachute. splashed down and got picked up by the Navy. To this end, NASA started development of a rocket, Ares I, and a big five man capsule (Orion). Ares I got as far as a test launch last October. Last week the money ran out, Obama decided to cut NASA funding.
NASA could have saved all the Ares I rocket development money by simply purchasing off-the-shelf Delta V rockets from Boeing. Delta V is in production, development and testing is complete and paid for, and it launches commercial satellites on a weekly basis. Delta is just as powerful as Aries I and can fly any mission Aries I could.
NASA argued that the Delta V wasn't "man rated". "Man-rated" means the builder has done a lot of extra paperwork showing how safe the rocket is. Then NASA argued that the Aries (never flown) would be safer than Delta V (been flying for years). This arguement is unconvincing to anyone with actual flightline experience, like me.
In actual fact, the satellites launched by Delta cost billions of dollars and a launch failure is a company wrecking catastrophe. Every thing that can be done to insure a successful launch has been done, Delta is as safe a rocket as can be built. It benefits from years of flight experience that allows the engineers to improve weak points. It's a mature design with all the bugs worked out. Ares was a dirty sheet of paper design (it reused Shuttle engines) with countless bugs yet to be discovered and fixed.
In real life, the NASA people wanted the challenge, the fun, and the funding, of a new hardware design. So they didn't do the economical and conservative thing, buy off the shelf, they started up a new rocket program and hoped the funding would appear. Well, the finding didn't appear and US astronauts will be riding Russian capsules to the International Space Station for years, perhaps forever.

A Russian ticket to the ISS costs $50 million dollars. I wonder what a Delta V launch, with a 5 man Orion capsule would cost.