The space shuttle is a reusable upper stage. The shuttle successfully massively increased the cost of the upper stage by making it reusable falling incredibly short of it's initial design goals.

The Shuttle also reused the SRBs which are the first stage. Only the fuel tank was single-use. The Falcon 9 is a (optionally!) reusable first stage but the second stage is discarded.

It’s also a massive stretch to describe the shuttle as “reusable” when the cost to refurbish the orbiter between flights was comparable to the cost of an expendable vehicle.

It’s not a stretch at all. That’s the definition of reusable. It might not be economical but that’s a whole other metric. Dismissing a first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art vehicle from the 1970s for not meeting the standards of 50 years in the future isn’t going to lead you to any insightful conclusions.

Amazing that people are so willing to dismiss economics to be technically correct. Hilariously, that kind of thinking is why we no longer use the shuttle.

Yeah, the whole point of reusability is cost efficiency. If your system is less cost efficient but technically reuses the vehicle, nobody cares (aside from maybe some checkbox-ticking federal bureaucrat).

Nobody is dismissing Economics. It's just not relevant to this conversation.

It’s not just that it didn’t meet the standards of today; it didn’t even meet the cost-efficiency goals it was originally intended to.

It met the capability requirements though. Including reusability.

I’m not going to continue to engage because you don’t seem to be engaging in good faith here.

If you can't engage constructively then that is probably for the best. But you should reevaluate your assessment because you have come to an incorrect conclusion.

I have engaged constructively this whole time, and you've downvoted every comment of mine you could. (HN doesn't allow you to downvote direct replies to your own comments, and those are the only comments of mine that aren't downvoted, so it's easy to tell.) That indicates bad faith.

The initial design goals was to build a space cargo plane understandable and acceptable to taxpayers and is capable of capturing a Soviet spy satellite with a mockup left in the orbit all in just one orbit and divert to any standard 747 runway and may be operated by both NASA and USAF.

The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.

The Space Shuttle is only partially reusable, cost a $billion per launch, has long been retired, and has a poor safety record, having lost its crew twice. It was cool, but didn't really fulfill its promise.

Falcon 9 is also only partially reusable. The claim is that Musk gave us reusable rockets with no qualifier on economics or safety. By that standard the Shuttle was first.

The Shuttle in original form can fly on a "regular AF mission" and bring back a Soviet Hubble and land "diverted" straight into Area 51. That's the point. The thing is all built around that purpose.

That sort of mission is mostly speculation. Nabbing a Soviet spy satellite would probably be suicide, they could have easily had scuttling charges onboard that would destroy both the satellite and the shuttle.

What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.

The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.