You're right, reuse didn't work out with the Shuttle nearly the way they wanted it to. But it did work out to some degree, while Buran's version of it never went beyond paper.
Re:Space Shuttle vs. Buran
by the_mitsuhiko on Saturday April 09, 2016 @05:54PM
(#11463527)
But also because they pulled the plug on the Buran program because they had no use for it. They could shoot people up in rockets and that worked out cheaper for them. The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.
> The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.
The Soyuz has been the most efficient way to shoot people into space since 1968. It was developed in parallel with Apollo, and instead of throwing it away after the end of the moon program, they just kept it, and kept improving it – had NASA kept Apollo and improved it instead of throwing it away, and then throwing its successor away, then cancelling two successors in a row, to spawn a grand total of four parallel programs to maybe find one successor, who knows where the US space program would be now.
NASA's problems are less technical issues, and more a management one.
The Energia solution wasn't as high-tech, but it was highly pragmatic: The boosters were also used as expendable rockets on their own right (Zenit), so high production volumes – and easier to handle fuels – decreased prices significantly, to the point that several Zenit-derived engines are in use by American and South Korean companies; and the main engine was exactly the scaled-down, cheaper, expendable SSME that NASA could have used to drive down Space Shuttle launch costs.