> The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle.
I wonder what the STS system would have been like if the DoD's cross-range requirement hadn't been imposed.
That too... And the whole boondoggle about launching from Vandenberg that never happened. That bit about it being "dual use" though helped in the "intimidate the Soviet Union" department.
Amazing (and kind of frustrating) how many decades it took for the industry to circle back to those more pragmatic ideas
Politicians don't like boring pragmatic ideas, they like cutting edge new things. You see it all over. Building a fancy building when a boring box would do. Building expensive trains when a cheap bus would do as well. Investing in cutting edge tech of all types when the existing technology already works perfectly and we have no reason to think the new will be better. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for fancy buildings, trains, and cutting edge technology, but politics often invests in the above when there is no reason to think they have a place just because it looks good.
The Space Shuttle was wrong in so many ways, not least that it was a "pickup truck" as opposed to a dedicated manned vehicle (with appropriate safety features) or a dedicated cargo vehicle. Because they couldn't do unmanned tests they were stuck with the barely reusable thermal tiles and couldn't replace them with something easier to reuse (or safer!)
Attempts at second generation reusable vehicles failed because rather than "solving reuse" they were all about single-stage to orbit (SSTO) [2] and aerospike engines and exotic composite materials that burned up the money/complexity/risk/technology budgets.
There was a report that came out towards the end of the SDI [3] phase that pointed out the path that SpaceX followed with Dragon 9 where you could make rather ordinary rockets and reuse the first stage but expend the second because the first stage is most of the expense. They thought psychology and politics would preclude that and that people would be seduced by SSTO, aerospikes, composites, etc.
Funny though out of all the design studies NASA did for the Shuttle and for heavy lift vehicles inspired by the O'Neill colony idea, there was a sketch of a "fly back booster" based on the Saturn V that would have basically been "Super Heavy" that was considered in 1979 that, retrospectively, could have given us Starship by 1990 or so. But no, we were committed to the Space Shuttle because boy the Soviet Union was intimidated by our willingness and ability to spend on senseless boondoggles!
[1] The first few times the shuttle went up they were afraid the tiles would get damaged and something like the Columbia accident would happen, they made some minor changes to get them to stick better and stopped worrying, at least in public. It took 100 launches for a failure mode than affects 1% of launches to actually happen.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative (which would have required much cheaper launch)