As most know, I have spent a good chunk of my life trying to get private launch vehicles off the ground, and comparing NASA costs to other alternatives is a big part of that job. Although there is no bigger fan of space flight than I am, it was painfully obvious even back in the 1980s that the Space Shuttle was a first-class government financial rat hole. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there isn't really much incentive to keep it cheap.

When the Space Station started rolling off the design tables, also in the 1980s, I watched the costs balloon ridiculously. At the time I was doing a private space newsletter (The Commercial Space Report), and did a number of articles comparing other concepts, including earlier designs like McDonnell Douglas' Manned Orbital Systems Concept, Columbus, designs based on external tanks, and others. Most of these were one hell of a lot easier and cheaper to build. As the NASA Space Station program proceeded, it also became obvious that getting pressurized habitable volume on orbit quickly and cheaply was way down low on the priority list.

So now we have a system where a structural truss...a SECTION of a structural truss...costs about $400 million. So it goes.