[zopa]

Griffin is pulling a bit of a fast one though: comparing Apollo to what the Space Shuttle turned out to be, rather what the Shuttle was promised to become. If Congress and the country had known that the choice was between a continued Apollo program and the Shuttle we actually got, it’s all too likely they would have chosen neither. Apollo cost too much to sustain; it’s no defense that the shuttle turned out to cost even more.

There’s a lot of hindsight bias here. We know now that the Shuttle was a bad design that was never going to give us cheap and routine access to space. But I don’t know that it’s fair to expect that to have been clear at the time, before it’d been tried.