[InclinedPlane]

The Shuttle is inspiring, and compared to nothing it looks excellent. But on the whole it is not a good system. It has unique capabilities that it uses extremely rarely or not at all (such as the cross-range flight ability) but which impose tremendous compromises on the system's cost, reliability, and safety.

All of this added up to the system falling far, far short of its design goals in payload cost and flight rate, by nearly 2 orders of magnitude. By any sound measure the Shuttle is a failed experiment that was left to run, and bleed NASA budgets dry, for far too long. On the whole each Shuttle mission cost $1.6 billion dollars.

The alternative to not building the Shuttle was continuing with what we had before, which even at a reduced budget compared to the Shuttle would have resulted in larger space stations, moon bases, and perhaps manned Mars missions. The alternative now to not continuing the Shuttle is relying on commercial launch providers as the base of manned spaceflight, which looks to be both cheaper and more capable than the Shuttle.

[benihana]

The shuttle mission, which was to provide a safe, reusable, cheap spaceflight platform, failed on two of the three goals. It was reusable, but not cheap, and not safe. We need a better LEO platform, not more shuttle missions.

[InclinedPlane]

3 of 3. The Shuttle is not reusable, it is at best refurbishable. In between launches the SRBs and the ET have to be replaced and the orbiter itself has to be processed including replacement of its main engines, draining of all consumables, and extensive inspection of each one of the thousands of thermal protective tiles. All in all the process takes months. This is not reusability in any meaningful sense of the word, it borders on a complete overhaul of the vehicle. Imagine if on landing a 747 it had to be drained of fuel, the engines replaced, the center fuel tank replaced.

This is a major factor in why it is so expensive to operate the Shuttles. They are not truly reusable, and the refurbishment in between launches takes so long and requires such an extensive permanent staff and facilities that the per-launch cost is astronomical. If the Orbiters were truly reusable then they could easily quadruple or more the number of flights per year for little increased total cost.