“We took a step backwards back in the late 70s when they decided to build the space shuttle. That was, in my opinion, a mistake. The shuttle was a very complicated machine. It did some pretty unusual, clearly spectacular things, like launch vertically and land horizontally. But from a technical standpoint, we launched a 280,000 pound machine to carry 25,000 pounds up to space. To go to the International Space Station.”
The only mistake was not developing the Shuttle far enough. Unlike the Apollo and Apollo-based programs, the Shuttle could land more conventionally.
“If we had maintained the Saturn V as a launch vehicle, we would have put eight times as much into Earth’s orbit. What’s interesting to me is: We are going back to the Saturn V system for the future programs. The Orion spaceship is almost a carbon copy of the Apollo spacecraft.”
Throwing out the Shuttle completely and revisiting Apollo was the step backwards.
Really? I guess you don't know much about aerodynamics then. An airplane is stupid for re-entry; all the wrong places get heated, as we saw well in 2003 when the shuttle broke up over TX, and in the X-15 program when Mike Adams got killed.
The best re-entry shape is a cone, a blunt lifting body. Thousands of missile research programs bore that out. But no, we had to have Buck Rogers in the mythical airplane-shaped spacecraft. It was stupid from the get-go, and that is an aerodynamic fact.