I think you are ignoring the benefial economic consequences of reusable spacecraft.Imagine BOEING having to rebuild an airliner from scratch for every trip Only the very rich would ever partake in airplane journeys. Normal cargo flights would be non existant.
benefial= beneficial
“I think you are ignoring the benefial economic consequences of reusable spacecraft.”
Not really. The shuttle was a flawed concept from the beginning. The cost-per-pound-to-orbit was radically underestimated, and the ability to turn the vehicles around was radically underestimated.
A reusable craft makes some sense if it is small, and is indeed the payload itself - such as a re-entry vehicle only
A bulk cargo to space should be mostly non-reusable You should NEVER return a pound of anything placed in orbit unless you absolutely have to - it’s a waste of money and energy.
The airliner analogy is ridiculous. Actually that’s the line that was sold for the Shuttle - to make space “routine”. It turned out to be a lie. We dismantled a proven bulk-cargo to orbit system in the Saturn series so that the Shuttle would have “something to do”.
The shuttle was a failure, in terms of killing astronauts, in terms of the mostly pointless work it did in orbit, and in terms of making spaceflight “routine”, and in terms of pushing out mature systems that worked.
Lets just be honest about that before we move on to the next phase.
Of course the next generation lifter concept NASA is peddling looks remarkably like a Saturn V with strap-on SRB’s.....that should tell you something right there.
NASA should stick with the things its now good at - making powerpoint slides.
Let real men, real explorers, and real Americans do the work that America needs done.