At the risk of treading into political water, in all fairness, Obama didn't "gut NASA's funding". This is a common misconception. I'm ABSOLUTELY NO fan of the current Administration, but I believe in being intellectually honest.
Constellation (Ares I and Ares V and Orion) were in DEEP, DEEP trouble LONG before the current Administration ever came to power. Ares I had severe developmental problems that have been spelled out repeatedly here and elsewhere for a long time, which fundamentally were crippling the entire system, including Orion and Ares V. They had spent $9 billion dollars and squandered 6 years of development time ahead of the impending shuttle retirement chasing their tails with Ares I, which was touted as "safe, simple, soon" but was NONE of those things. Remember the ORIGINAL plan was to replace the shuttle capabilities to ferry crews to ISS using Ares I and Orion, starting in 2014. The problems in the Constellation program were well known both inside and outside NASA to anyone wanting to know or paying attention (which leaves out 99.4% of the population, including most of Congress and in government). Obama sent Lori Garver to "look under the hood" at NASA and report back between his election and taking office, and then-NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was NOT pleased at the prospect. Evidently she saw enough that Obama called the Augustine Commission to review the program and the direction of the US space program, and surprise, surprise, they found NO way forward with Constellation but to increase NASA's funding by $3 billion a year, or shut down the program and try something else. Obama canceled Constellation (rightly so, given the status and prospects of the program) and Orion with it, which of course terrified the Congressional "space state" politicians and their big gubmint contractor constituencies. Remember these same political hacks and their contractor buddies succeeded in getting O'Keefe and Steidle replaced with Mike Griffin, eliminating the "spiral development" implementation of the VSE in favor of the "Shuttle-derived" approach (one which guaranteed the development and operations of the vehicle(s) would be incredibly expensive and time consuming, and suck all the air out of the room for other programs, but which of course would by definition keep the government pork flowing from Congress through NASA to the big aerospace contractors that had been making a fortune on shuttle for decades.) IF we had stuck with "spiral development", we would be flying a NASA-operated block I Orion on a modified EELV *right now* to transport our own astronauts to the nearly $200 billion dollar space station we put up there along with our "international partners" instead of being held hostage to the Russians to do it for us. In short, SHUTTLE DERIVED did more to kill the US space program than Obama did.
Obama suggested funding the Commercial Crew program in place of Constellation, at $800 million per year. Congress, not wanting to give money to the "upstarts" like SpaceX, but rather committed to keeping that money flowing to the big aerospace contractors like Boeing, Lockheed, etc. as it always had (and of course seeing a portion of that money flow back to themselves via the huge lobbying efforts of the big aerospace contractors) REFUSED to fun Commercial Crew at anything like the recommendations made in the budget proposals from the White House, but instead funded it at a pittance (like $300 million a year, less than HALF what Obama had requested for the program) and instead passed the "Senate Launch System" authorization directing NASA to build SLS and revive Orion.
Of course, Boeing wasn't going to be left out of the competition-- NO WAY they'd pass up the possibility of getting free money laying on the table, so they came up with a scheme to make a 'cheap, commercial' version of the Orion capsule, called "CST-100". By the time that Constellation was cancelled, basically it was generally admitted that Orion would NEVER transport crews to ISS-- it was going to be FAR too expensive to ever use in that role, and it had been continually "de-scoped" virtually from the beginning of development to make it light enough for the anemic Ares I to loft into orbit... the final iteration did away with the "6 crew to ISS" capability completely, and Orion can now only carry four astronauts, as was the plan for the deep space only version. Boeing simply copied Orion with the plan of making a cheap, LEO version strictly for the "commercial crew" option. They got development money for CST-100 and have been making slow progress since (slow since basically ALL the commercial crew alternatives are completely underfunded, BECAUSE CONGRESS HAS REPEATEDLY AND STEADFASTLY *REFUSED* TO FUND THEM PROPERLY, which is in their purview to do since they approve the final budgets!) Now Boeing is trying to "strong arm" the process by whining that "we're gonna stop working on CST-100 unless we get a bunch of gubmint money", attempting to FORCE a downselect to a single contractor. Of course they have a good chance of making it work-- they have the lobbying power behind them and enough "insiders" who constantly move through the revolving door between industry and gubmint (Congress, NASA) that they have the "inside track" on greasing enough wheels to get what they want. Heck even ATK tried to get in on this action, using their "clone" of the Ares I, the so-called "Liberty" launch vehicle (which would have paired the ATK made five-segment SRB first stage of Ares I with an Ariane V hydrogen-fueled core stage as an upper stage for the Liberty vehicle) with their own "clone" of the Orion, in their case, using copies of a pathfinder all-composite Orion hull they'd been paid to develop under a NASA development contract during Orion development, into which they planned to graft pretty much "off the shelf" systems to make an operational "commercial crew" spacecraft to ferry astronauts atop their Liberty vehicle to ISS. The whole thing pretty much died AFAIK; haven't heard anything about it in years... (probably because NASA owns all the remaining shuttle SRB casings, upon which the Liberty vehicle is entirely dependent for its first stages, unless/until ATK develops a disposable composite casing, which they intend to get a billion dollar plus contract from NASA to do under the 'advanced booster competition' for SLS Block 2. Developing them now on their own dime would be the height of stupidity-- sit and wait for that big fat decade-long development cost-plus contract from gubmint to come through-- let others play with the commercial crew 'small potatoes'.)
Of course, when and if they DO, you can expect to see delays requiring "more money" to fix, and you can expect to see their costs for their "commercial spacecraft" to go through the roof compared to the competition. Meanwhile, SpaceX and the other commercial crew competitors will be frozen out. Unless they can finish their efforts on their own dime, and establish a customer base on their own (private spaceflight, science, research, space tourism, whatever) then they'll slowly sputter out. Personally I don't think the odds of them succeeding without the Commercial Crew program are very good... I think, from what I see, that the realm of private manned spaceflight demand is perhaps a mile wide, but ONLY AN INCH DEEP. I don't think there's enough money or demand to build a viable commercial-only endeavor upon. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so... I haven't been wrong so far about how all this has unfolded. I figured Constellation would get the ax back in about 2007 or so, and I'm not convinced that SLS will ever do anything more than a handful of test flights and maybe some cock-a-mamey "stunt" type "mission", if that, if it's not cancelled first.
At any rate, this is the sort of thing I've come to expect from NASA and gubmint and industry, which is in fact, due to the revolving door between them, basically the same old "government-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned about 60 years ago...
As long as the space program is held hostage by the same self-serving group of politicians/industrialists, you can forget having a REAL space program of any interest or importance. It's all devolved to the point of "the RIGHT people getting the money", NOT about actual space capabilities or achievements.
Later! OL JR