If you go buy actual objective measure of what people tried to achieve, Shuttle is a failure. They literally drop an architecture, Apollo, that was perfectly achieving what needed to be achieved, namely, facilitate humans to LEO, extreme large payload to LEO and large payload to LEO, very fast payloads for outside of LEO and single shot space stations. All of that existed and was able to be build of the shelf.

Shuttle then took all that money, in turn losing the US the capability to do all this amazing stuff. With the promise that it could then do all those things again but actually do it cheaper.

In that aspect, Shuttle completely failed. Not only did the US lose most of its capability for the next 40 years, some we still have not gotten back. And it did that while costing absurd amounts to develop and then a huge amount to operate, so much that NASA barely had a budget to actually do anything useful with Shuttle. And of course it also took so much time to develop that a whole space station had to be scarified for it.

So really the whole Shuttle program is an anti-achievement, it literally directly reduced the technical capability of a nation and turned it from the best space nation in the world into the second best to arguable being second best.

Technical complexity by itself is not a mark of great engineering, and that's all Shuttle was. In terms of actual objective measure, Shuttle is a failure pretty much every way you look at it. Failure on cost, failure on safety, failure on ecosystem, failure of evolution, failure operational reliability and so on.

Soviets could launch payload and human cheaper to LEO for the next 40 years and only SpaceX brought this back to the US.

The parts were reused but they rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, everytime. Reusability means something like a plane: refuel + safety checks and you’re good to go again

> Wild what NASA did 40 years ago…

You can do that when you have $1b/flight to spend on refurbishing.

And all designed in the 1970s.

I'm not sure why you would call Starship a "fever dream". The numbers work. It's in testing. I could see calling the Saudi "Line City" a fever dream, or California's HSR. But not Starship.

True, but they're doing it on a far lower budget than the Space Shuttle.

A single RS-9 engine -- one of five used in the SLS -- costs more than an entire Falcon 9 launch with payload, taxes, and profit!

Starship is similarly frugal. Its construction is simpler, it is made of cheaper materials, it uses a cheaper fuel, etc, etc...

“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”

And isn't that decision to leave humans behind on the ground an inspired piece of mission planning. It's wonderful that computers and telemetry has progressed so far.

There were 135 space shuttle missions over 30 years, with 2 failures resulting in 14 lives lost, giving a success rate of 98.5%. The second failure happened when the program was mature, which means that either NASA didn't analyze certain failure modes or they didn't take steps to address them. The Space Shuttle's design is inherently less safe than a normal capsule on top. With the orbiter on the side of the stack, any debris from other components is more likely to damage it. The orbiter also had no launch escape system or ability for crew to eject. Also, the solid boosters could not be throttled or shut down early if they malfunctioned. In contrast, capsules like Dragon and Soyuz are above the booster stages, reducing the chance of damage from any malfunctions in the stages, and allowing a launch escape system to get the crew away in the event of an emergency.

Falcon 9 has had 531 launches over 15 years (394 of them have happened since January of 2022), with 3 failures (one on the pad before launch, two during launch), for a success rate of 99.4%. Had these failures occurred during manned missions, the Dragon capsule's launch escape system would have likely saved the crew.

The mature version of Falcon 9 (block 5) has had 466 successful landings out of 472 attempts, giving it a success rate of 98.7%. This likely means that riding on a Falcon 9 first stage with no additional safety devices (such as a parachute or a launch escape system) is safer than riding in the Shuttle.