NASA spent over $209 billion on the STS for a cost per flight of nearly $1.6 billion, over $27,000 per pound to LEO.
Then-NASA administrator James Fletcher told Congress in 1972 that the shuttle would cost $5.15 billion to develop and could be operated at a cost of $10.5 million per flight, approximately $630 per pound adjusting for inflation to 2011.
Russian Proton expendable launchers, still largely based on the design that dates back to 1965, are said to cost as little as $110 million, approximately $2,300 per pound to LEO.
What did we get for this money? Here's a typical mission:
- STS-95 spent ten days engaged in the following experiments:
- Sent cockroaches up to see how microgravity would affect their growth at various stages of their life cycle
- Studied a "space rose" to see what kinds of essential oils it would produce in weightless environment. (in a triumph of technology transfer, this was later developed into a perfume).
- At the suggestion of elementary school children, monitored everyday objects such as soap, crayons, and string to see whether their inertial mass would change in a weightless environment. Preliminary results suggest that Newton was right.
- Monitored the growth of fish eggs and rice plants in space (orbital sushi?)
- Tested new space appliances, including a space camcorder and space freezer
- Checked to see whether melatonin would make the crew sleepy (it did not)
http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
The Soviet Shuttle, the Buran (snowstorm) was an aerodynamic clone of the American orbiter, but incorporated many original features that had been considered and rejected for the American program, such as all-liquid rocket boosters, jet engines, ejection seats and an unmanned flight capability.
You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design.
The NASA obsession with elementary and middle school participation in space flight is curious, and demonstrates how low a status actual in-flight science has compared with orbital public relations. You are not likely to hear of CERN physicists colliding tin atoms sent to them by a primary school in Toulouse, or the Hubble space telescope being turned around to point at waving middle schoolers on a playground in Texas, yet even the minimal two-man ISS crew - one short of the stated minimum needed to run the station - regularly takes time to talk to schoolchildren.
"The Shuttle was built with a really very bizarre set of functional requirements that imposed steep demands on the design of the vehicle but which turned out to be mostly useless in a practical sense and were not actually meaningfully used during the lifetime of the vehicle. For example, the large wings on the Shuttle give it a very high cross-range flight capability during re-entry, but that was only a requirement because it was thought that the Shuttle would perform a particular kind of military mission. A polar launch which would deploy a satellite, or perform other activities, in one orbit and return to the launch site.
Such missions never materialized. And yet that requirement dictated the size of the wings which forced the frame to be larger and heavier, which reduced the payload, and which created a larger area that needed thermal protection (an issue which contributed to the loss of Columbia, for example), and so forth. A clean sheet design without such a requirement should have had much smaller wings and thus be a more capable and more reliable design."
Operations were promised to be simple.
Wernher von Braun wrote in the Nov 1974 issue of Popular Science:
"After landing, Shuttle craft will quickly be readied for another mission. Each vehicle can be orbited 100 or more times. This reusable aspect of the Shuttle program lowers the cost per flight to $10.5 million. Orbital transportation cost for each pound of orbital payload will be about $160, compared to $500-$1000 with conventional expendable rockets."
http://goo.gl/ZYiTz5
In reality, re-usability was very labor intensive and expensive, defeating the purpose of re-usability.
An MIT class on the Space Shuttle: http://goo.gl/yFzL5Y
http://colonyfund.com/Entrepreneurs/Phys_Econ_2_LEO.pdf
http://colonyfund.com/Entrepreneurs/Phys_Econ_2_LEO.pdf
"The difficulties of designing, building, and maintaining reusable vehicles are well established. The recovery process and required systems for a reusable first stage are potentially much simpler, and therefore less expensive, than for the orbital stage. It appears that the STS got it exactly backwards by having the heavy RLV components in the orbiter and using an expendable external tank and relatively short-lived SRBs. That is, the first stage of a cheap system should be recovered and reflown, and the upper stage(s) should be expendable.
Note that this is the approach to be used in the SpaceX Falcon series."
