Bad Monkey!":3pmyj8ta said:
The shuttle was never going to fly at that rate. It was far too complex and needed too much maintenance after every flight, and there was no mission or economic reason to support that kind of mission rate.
There was also the fact that they specifically redesigned the program several times to lower development costs knowing full well that they would increase operational costs by doing so (eg., switching to the solid rocket boosters over recoverable liquid rocket boosters). They did succeed in lowering development costs (the development program only had a 20% overrun or so, which is amazing in big aerospace projects), but obviously the development cost bite was a lot higher than they anticipated, particularly since they had a far worse understanding of the relevant technologies than we do today. Hindsight is 20/20, but they did know damn well they were going to make a less economical booster than was theoretically possible at the time.
Bad Monkey!":3pmyj8ta said:
The only reason it was flying at all for the last 15 years of the program was ISS, which is a massive boondoggle in itself.
Well, that and the fact that it was the only HSF program the US had before 2001. If Columbia hadn't failed, they were planning on flying the damn things into the 2020s...
Personally, I don't really think I support HSF any more, to any real extent, at least as something that NASA ought to be doing (if SpaceX or Golden Spike wants to spend their money, more power to them). I'm much more interested in and excited by the robotic explorers than human ones, anymore. So I guess NASA could dump HSF after ISS and it wouldn't really bother me...
