[mikeash]

There's some accounting fun in that, though. The marginal cost of a Shuttle launch was considerably lower. $1-2 billion is what you get by dividing the budget by the number of launches. Much of the cost went into maintaining the fleet and would have had to be paid whether or not they launched. That's substantially different than with an expendable launcher.

[Lambdanaut]

Lmfao isn't that extremely ironic? The purpose of the shuttle was to have a semi-reusable rocket to save a little money. Instead we end up blowing billions just maintaining and refurbishing the fleet. The shuttle very obviously wasn't the way to go.

I think SpaceX's grasshopper setup is more promising. It doesn't need to withstand the same pressures that the shuttle had to because of the altitude at which it returns to Earth, so there's not so much to refurbish. That, and it also comes down like a pencil rather than like a rock.

[mikeash]

The Shuttle's cheapness was predicated on a high launch rate. When the high launch rate wasn't achievable, it became pretty expensive. That's only to be expected, of course. A 747 is an economical way to fling a bunch of people and cargo across the Pacific if you do it once a day, but it's terribly expensive if you only fly it a couple of times a year. The Shuttle was decent enough conceptually, but it pushed the envelope in too many places and that hurt reusability a lot.

I agree that SpaceX's setup is more promising. The fact that they're slightly modifying an existing expendable rocket that's already cost-competitive means that any reuse is just a bonus. They can throw away a bunch of boosters as they work on the problem, which wasn't an option with the shuttle at $2 billion apiece just to construct them.