"Skorpious"
That was actually thoughtfull and informative
which is something I never
expect from this group.

Shove it up your ass.

Ray Schmitt

-Unfortunately, the $200 per pound of payload
-promised by the shuttle proponents back then has turned
-out to be about $10,000 per pound
-(a 5000% underestimate).

-Lotsa people today believe that the real problem is NASA
-which is slammed as a bungling, bloated bureaucracy
-that has tied the shuttle in wads of unnecessary and expensive
-red tape.

The initial cost estimates were based on weekly flight rates. In this
way, the high cost of the bloated bureaucracy would be divided among 52
flights. The only way to get this number of flights would be if the
processing for flight consisted of attaching the SRBs, attaching and
refueling the ET, wash the windows, and launch.

The current flight processing involves engine swaps, thousands of man
hours of maintenance, and 4x per year flight rates. So the bureaucratic
cost of the PhD chair-warmers and his rug-rat's dental work is a
significant fraction of the dollars per pound on orbit.

Assuming that there have been incremental advances in technology in the
interim, a next-gen shuttle should endeavor to increase maintainability
of the vehicle, or to put it another way, reduce the number of
maintenance items required.