[jondiggsit]

I’ve read that a shuttle refit after landing was so expensive and time consuming to render it useless…. Feel free to correct if wrong.

[e_y_]

The turnaround time for Shuttle was 2-3 months, while building a brand new rocket takes like 1-2 years. Although for the cost of Shuttle, we could have built a whole bunch of expendable rockets, pipelined with a regular launch cadence, and probably also gotten some cost savings through economies of scale.

[pfdietz]

And, the market projections that indicated there would be enough payloads for large amounts of launches were also basically fraudulent.