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Comment by rubinelli | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the Shuttle program was scrapped that the consensus was that reusable vehicles didn't offer the economy they promised, so what has changed since then?

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The shuttle had to make tons of major design compromises in order to get funding, and that basically reduced its utility, limited its launch rate and capacity, and blew out the operational costs.

Critically, the shuttle dumped its engines into the ocean, which meant extensive rebuilding and refurbishing was required in order to make them flightworthy again. The fastest reuse time for a Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster was almost 3 months (and before it was nearly 2).

The most expensive component of a rocket is the first stage (particularly its engines), and SpaceX lands those on a pad, which means no costly saltwater removal. SpaceX is aiming to reuse a rocket within 24 hours this year (So far the fastest they've done is 71 days, but they're being cautious).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

Doesn't matter if you can reuse something if refurbishing costs as much as building a new one. Space just has a more sensible design with better materials and computers.

And SpaceX is doing a totally different thing. They are not putting anything like the shuttle in orbit (humand+cargo). Shuttle's other big thing was that it returned all of its engines to the ground for reuse. All shuttle threw away was the big orange tank. SpaceX had abandoned that concept, returning only the first stage and dumping the second/third stages into the sea. We will probably never see anything like shuttle again.

Shuttle also had the insane design decision of requiring human crew to be sent up on every single flight, rather than as an optional payload.

Shuttle returned all of its engines by throwing the srbs to the sea. Maybe using a cheap replacement to those and expending it on each flight would be cheaper. At the same time spacex decided against reusing the second stage, essentially making that decision for it's own stack

Starship is very similar to the shuttle in that it will be a reused second stage carrying humans and/or cargo (humans optional unlike Shuttle). Hopefully unlike shuttle it will be able to be reflown without extensive, expensive refurbishment.

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