Shuttle was in some respects designed to need them. When your goal is to employ a standing army, you will reach that goal one way or another. Shuttle is rebuildable, not reusable, and that s not what we need. A properly designed space ship will seek to minimize operations costs, not maximize performance. We have yet to build rockets whose design was driven by operations, and it s time to do it.
Operations driven designs are the key to our future in space.
There are probably a dozen paths to success, but let me lay out one of them. We re far more concerned with keeping total mission costs down than with optimizing performance. We re looking to build a ship, not ammunition, and we want to keep things as simple as possible. We want incremental testing, so that we can feel our way to the edge of the envelope. We sold this concept to the National Space Council in 1989, but alas it was only partially implemented before X-33 came to dominate space development.