>>12386879I dont know why people obsess over the shuttle, its objectively clear where it went wrong, it was too ambitious.
Imagine you have a kid, so you put him in piano lessons, he plays ok, fantastic, smart capable boy, LETS FORCE HIM TO BECOME A TRAINED MARINE, SURGEON AND ATHLETE BEFORE AGE 14. You would have never guessed! he didn't do actually any of those things just failed horribly and wasted tons of time and resources, there was no way of anticipating this.
Same thing happened with the shuttle. The us were doing extremely good considering the state of general technology at that time, clearly ahead of everyone, if they had just asked from the shuttle to be a small concept proof of spaceplanes that provide a modest cost benefit over launching with saturn v to pursue incremental savings then everything would have been ok, just a small shuttle, optimized to carry people, small cargo, orbiter on top, no solid boosters, no huge commiting that makes it impossible to cancel for 50 years then it would have been fine, it would have either been a nice intermediate step between the saturn and starship which could have realistically had a less capable version to what we know today started to be constructed in the 80s-90s and everyone would be happy we would be planning permanent mars habitation after having a permanent moon base and already visited mars in an apollo style boots mission.
But no, ohhhh no, congressmen werent gonna have none of that, between them and the airforce they demanded a vehicle capable of putting a trillion tons in orbit, capable of flying like an airplane to basically everywhere, but also it had to be able to snatch satellites, oh oh and manufacture it using these and these components, in these and these states, and have it be cheap but reusable but move enough money, also carry 7 astronauts and...
well you know the rest
