You should have two ways 4 getting things to space. Way #1 should be very cheap and should get regular payloads up there. Way #2 must be more expensive since it must be man-rated & its job is getting people safely to and from orbit.

Shuttle is not well designed cause it tries to do too much in one package & be all things to all users like military & manned spaceflight program managers & straight unmanned projects. It does a lot of different things. There are better ways of doing these things if you divvy up the jobs among more than one vehicle.

X-38 is not for payloads. Just people. An important first step.