Reply #15: Well, that ignores... [View All]

[punpirate]

... the Hubble, and the Hubble repair missions and the launches of some of those unmanned probes.

The real problem with the shuttle program is that it was intended to be a space truck, and a lot of the features to insure crew safety were abandoned early in the design stage to increase the freight capacity. I suspect some of that was done at the insistence of the Air Force, because of the size of some the spy satellites they intended to launch and because of the size of some proposed SDI equipment. The Air Force has always had roughly a 20% budget interest in NASA, and considerable mission interest as a result. It's no accident that mission commanders are military.