There never was, outside from in Japan. The US had a very feeble titanium metal industry which was never good enough to satisfy their own demand. You have to remember they made the SR-71 with imported Soviet titanium, and that was when the US was still an industrial powerhouse.
Creating titanium metal smelters and refiners takes many years of long investments before getting decent output out of it. This is something Western investors expecting instant profits balk at financing.
A couple decades ago there was a lot of excitement about the FFC Cambridge process.
People expected it to replace the Kroll process with something more energetically efficient similar to electrolysis of aluminium, but it flopped. Titanium will remain expensive until someone comes up with something better than the Kroll process.
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