"rschmitt23" wrote

The study considered both development and operation costs
(which Mathematica called *total launch costs*) for then-current
ELVs (Atlas, Delta and Titan) and for NASA's new RLV, the shuttle.
After cranking their software, Mathematica found that the total
launch costs for the ELVs and the shuttle were nearly the same.
However, the caveat is that NASA, in order to get this wash, fed
Mathematica a low-ball operating cost number for the shuttle, $10M
per flight in 1970 dollars, equivalent to about $40M per flight in
today's money. If anything like the actual $500M per flight (today's
dollar) operating cost would have been used in this study, the
total launch cost for the shuttle would have far exceeded that
of the ELVs and Congress would never have OKed the shuttle program.

A spreadsheet that recently floated my way listed Shuttle program
costs 1971 - 2002, inflated the costs to 2003 dollars, summed them up,
and found that, dividing by the total number of flights, the program
cost has been $1.16G/flight. That, of course, included a number of
years in which there were no flights at all. Of years in which there
were one or more flights, the lowest per-flight cost in FY2003 bucks
was $423M in 1997.

Probably there were infrastructure things like range support not
prorated into the costs.