>On the face of it throw away seems wasteful but the space shuttle has been hugely expensive to run and as so few where made never benefited from economies of scale. The original shuttle design was to be fully re usable and cheap it failed both those. NASA should have seperated cargo and people. Heavy lift rocket (Saturn V) for cargo and booster launching a reusable component for people which is what they are now going for and its all stuff that was available thiry years ago. The obsession with the partly re usable space shuttle was a dead end.

Good points

>Most forms of travel become safer as time passes, US space travel is the only one that went the other way.

So true!

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>>I'd hardly call it "dead-end". It HAS been going for decades now. Alright, a bit creaky and primitive (covered in polystyrene insulating tiles :-) but has served its purpose (is there only one left now after the 2 disasters?)
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>>The Saturn/Apollo launches were a bit wasteful of materiel, with their ejected stages (mind you, the fuel tank that the shuttle dumps isn't exactly just a cellophane wrapper). Are you suggesting they should have carried on with multi-stage launches, as Europe and Russia still do? Personally I think they should have originally followed the Chuck Yeager X-1 route. That was shelved, wasn't it, for the cheap and nasty rocket soln., just so the US could put one over the Russians - cold was space race.
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>>>Its alright the US goes down technological dead ends at times. look at the space shuttle . Their space program would have been enormously more efficient of they had evolved on from Saturn/Apollo instead of ditching it all. I stiil remember footage of the astronauts doing gymnastics in skylab.
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