[astroflask]

In theory the shuttle promised sustainability. But as the years went by it proved to be more expensive and almost 5x deadlier than the Apollo stack.

The shuttle did make sense for some things it was never used (DoD influence there) and it was an incredible piece of technology. It was also the workhorse for a big part of the ISS. But then again, that all happened in LEO, and different things could have been achieved by just iterating over Apollo/Saturn, in LEO and further away.

[pfdietz]

The engineers knew from the beginning that the Shuttle made no sense. The mission numbers used to justify it were always absurd and assumed a flight rate that they knew wasn't going to be achieved.