> At the time of crash, they were on course to be running 3-4 Shuttles at 4 flights each every year. [1] The cadence afterward was a pretty massive change.

We have some sense of what the near-term cadence goal, pre-Columbia, was for the shuttle from a document Reagan signed in 1984 that forecast 24 missions a year, maybe by 1988. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/03/05/n...> By then it was clear that the shuttle would never come close to the every two-week launch schedule forecast during the 1970s (and expected, back when the first launch was scheduled for 1979). But yes, 24 missions a year using both Canaveral and Vandenberg would have helped a lot with amortizing launch costs.

That said, that's still putting lipstick on a pig. The shuttle program cost $196 billion in 2011 dollars over its entire lifespan. <https://phys.org/news/2011-07-space-shuttle-legacy-soaring-o...> That's $1.45 billion per its 135 missions. By contrast, NASA pays $55 million per seat on SpaceX Crew Dragon as of 2019. <https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...> It's not apples-to-apples because a shuttle carried up to seven people and Crew Dragon missions have so far been no more than four people, and a shuttle mission often launched a satellite, but a SpaceX unmanned launch costs $67 to 97 million depending on rocket used. <https://www.space.com/spacex-raises-prices-launch-starlink-i...> 7 * $55 million + $97 million=$482 million; let's say $500 million. And that's in today's dollars as opposed to the 2011 dollars for the $1.45 billion figure. Further, the SpaceX combination

* is a far safer design (unmanned unless crew is actually needed, manned cabin on top of rocket and not on the side, escape system if needed)

* can provide an astoundingly frequent cadence (just under 100 launches in 2023, goal of 144 for 2024)

* does not yet include Starship, which if successful will further lower costs and increase maximum launchable mass

But the topic is what Apollo-Saturn could have done if continued. The $1.45 billion per launch figure is based on 30 years of the shuttle; in other words, the system has been optimized for efficiency as much as possible. As mentioned, the shuttle flew 135 times during those 30 years, for 4.5 missions per year. Griffin is saying in 2007 that for the cost of maybe five shuttle missions ($6 billion), the United States would have had each and every year for the three decades from the mid-1970s, when Apollo ended:

* Two missions to the moon

* Four missions to Skylab-class space stations

* One new Skylab every five years

And that's not factoring in incremental improvements. Over time the command/service module (the "Apollo" portion) would have gained a glass cockpit, and even wings for controlled landing. <http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/001337.html> There were similar proposals to make part of the Saturn rocket reusable. <https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37052.0> But Griffin's scenario does not need enormous cost reductions from drastic redesigns; only the inevitable ones that come from a steady production line optimized over decades.

In a sense, all of this is missing the most remarkable fact: That this is the head of NASA stating all this in writing in 2007, when the shuttle program had not yet ended!