Why were the shuttles retired? Would the tech have evolved to make them more effective and efficient? Why was there a return to rockets? Are they as reusable?
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In: Technology
The space shuttles were incredibly expensive to launch and maintain (far more than anticipated), they were aging (having been designed in the 70’s and built in the 70’s – 80’s) and the Challenger and Columbia disasters showed that there were fundamental safety concerns. They also weren’t really needed anymore. By 2011, the ISS was mostly completely, and so the shuttle’s job was done. Everything else that the shuttle did could be done faster and cheaper with traditional rockets.
As for what could have been done to make them more effective and more efficient, not much really. The problem with the space shuttle was that it had a bunch of design compromises to please different interested parties. NASA, the Department of Defense, and Congress all demanded certain concessions, and the end result was a vehicle that was a jack of all trades but master of none. Obviously the shuttle had many technical upgrades over the decades, but the fundamental design couldn’t be changed, and a lot of the cost overruns and inefficiencies were baked in by that point because of how Congress funded the shuttle program.
So as we see now, traditional rockets are much cheaper than the shuttle and can sustain a much higher launch cadence. So they’re cheaper and more efficient. Some of them are at least partially reusable, which brings costs down, and others are not reusable but just cheap to build and launch.
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