[cfraenkel]

And also made missions at least 3X more expensive..... It wasn't just the on-paper launch costs. Everything had to be man-rated, meaning, among many other things, everything that operated during the launch had to be triple redundant, all the pyros had to be unpowered while onboard the shuttle (meaning you had to design another system to then power up the pyros and make it reliable), you needed three full launch crews (Cape, Johnson, plus wherever you actually ran your own ops) and all three launch crews had to support an endless set of rehearsals and launch delays.... The costs kept mounting. (source - was in program office of expendable launch comm sat, each satellite was ~$150M, launch was ~$80M. Roughly comparable mission down the hall cost ~$300M / satellite, ~$500M / launch.)