Hi Gary

Thanks for the high praise - though Nick is definitely out of my league since I am a humble B.Sc.

False economy - savings now, major costs later. Happens all the time in industry and Government. Someone at some level thinks a repair bill or economic analysis or engineering option is asking too much of their watch so they go the cheaper option - (a) ignore it (b) do something cheaper (c) do something with substandard parts, or (d) all three, in the case of the Shuttle.

To wit...

(a) Ignore the goal of cheaper spaceflight. By doing so NASA has kept all those federal employees and their home states happy for ~ 35 years without having to change very much. They had the visionaries working for them, but no of the real bosses cared what they thought.

(b) Do something cheaper. An ET and SRBs and an Orbiter that lugs 12 useless tons of main engines into orbit was cheaper than a two-stage fully reusable, but ironically not cheaper and definitely less adaptable than Buran/Energia.

(c) Substandard parts - Let me just say: O-rings. And more to the point the whole system just doesn't measure up as a sensible launcher configuration.

But it sort of hobbled along over 22 years with +100 successful launches and one failure. Not bad. Pity cheap design meant the Orbiter was too big and too heavy for anything but fluffy thermal protection tiles.

And it failed as a CATS system mainly because no one could think of enough payload to haul to LEO to get the per flight cost down. At 60 launches a year the STS could've cut costs x 10, but cheap design meant it couldn't fly 60 launches a year. The economy sublimed away like Martian snow...

Adam