[5874-4b22-a4e0]

I doubt a better design could have been come up with even if they had a copy of kerbal space program back in the day.

[pfdietz]

Minimum Cost Design expendable boosters would have been far better than the Shuttle. And they could have been designed in the 1960s, when Arthur Schnitt came out with the idea.

One can view the (expendable) F9 as an implementation of MCD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster