It's good we lost the shuttle. It was hot garbage.
> now struggling just to get a small copy reaching the ISS.
I think you need to take funding levels into account.
The Shuttle cost $1.5B per launch (fully amortized). None of the commercial crew/cargo vehicles are anywhere close to that price. And the commercial crew vehicles are more capable of doing their job.
That's on top of having almost no endurance, having a pathetic payload mass fraction, needing humans to pilot it (meaning that it's much more difficult to improve the vehicle), and being an inherently unsafe design.
It's good we lost the shuttle. It was hot garbage.
> now struggling just to get a small copy reaching the ISS.
I think you need to take funding levels into account.
The Shuttle cost $1.5B per launch (fully amortized). None of the commercial crew/cargo vehicles are anywhere close to that price. And the commercial crew vehicles are more capable of doing their job.
That's on top of having almost no endurance, having a pathetic payload mass fraction, needing humans to pilot it (meaning that it's much more difficult to improve the vehicle), and being an inherently unsafe design.