Most useless/wastelful thing every bought

Blaizes wrote: »

My little pony castle, a huge expensive piece of plastic junk that had to be built then kept falling apart. Never again.

The Space Shuttle program cost $196bn in direct costs.


Even before its first flight it was responsible for the loss of the Skylab space station and all that habitable volume.

The huge size and wings* were needed to sell it to the military.
They didn't use it much.

And commercial launches to GEO dried up when the penny dropped about how dangerous it was having a liquid fuelled booster inside your spacecraft.


And Galileo could have a ring side seat for Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter if it wasn't for Shuttle delays. So it's quite possible that this white elephant has doomed humanity as the planetary defence system wasn't built in time to stop the asteroid that will kill us all.


And the much touted "Satellite retrieval" ability was only used on 4 flights. And only one of those was for commercial satellites, and it would have been cheaper to replace the satellites.


Huge size meant huge cost. It meant a trip to the ISS cost a billion dollars at a time the Russians were selling seats on Soyuz for $35m a pop.


Even after it's retirement it is still costing NASA billions a year. They are paying Boeing and Lockheed to re-use the engines and side boosters** from the Shuttle in the SLS. They'd already spent billions developing Ares from the same bits.


* Wings - Would Columbia have survived if it had smaller wings ?
** SRB - Challenger was lost so they could recycle steel tubes used in the boosters

:mad: