Because they killed off all the space lines to make room for Star Wars legos, which completely blow, except for a couple of the massive 500 dollar collector sets like the Millenium Falcon and the Corellian Cruiser.The lego star wars sets ruined all of the creativity in Lego. Every set was made with brand new set-specific blocks that were rarely useful in constructing anything besides what they were designed to create.This trend is thankfully starting to reverse itself, as the new Space Police sets seem to have brought back the old-style design aesthetic, where the structural pieces were largely generic minus a handful of pieces that would be unique to a collection but not to a single set, and any truly set-specific pieces tend to be cosmetic decorations.The unique-to-set pieces were bad because unless you bought multiples of a single set you never had an opportunity to collect multiple copies of that particular block which makes it damned hard to be creative and build original designs. Those pieces just get left out...not useful for anything unless one is enough for what you had in mind.