[Vince Ferrer]

The Space Shuttle was a reusable booster.

The shuttle was a nice try at reusability, but in practice fell far short. The main fuel tank (orange) was completely expendable. The solid rocket motors (white) were recovered, but the amount of repair work needed to use them again put the price of reuse to be not much less than building new ones. The orbiter was the reusable part, but even it had to go through very expensive repairs and checks between flights.

The goal of the Spacex reusable rockets, is to have minimal repairs between flights, ideally just to refuel it.

[Cincinatus]

I know what their goal is. I also know that reusability has been a goal of spaceflight since it began and every attempt to achieve it has fallen short for one reason or another.

Reusable is one thing; cheap access to space is something else. SpaceX is about to learn that lesson.

[Gaffer]

Oh, the promises they made when they first proposed this system. Dozens of flights per year, days turnaround....impossibly optimistic claims. Just like government always does when they want to spend your money.

[zeugma]

The main fuel tank (orange) was completely expendable.

This has always bothered me. Several organizations attempted to get the government to leave the tanks in orbit for future use. We spent a lot of money to get that hardware up there, and NASA just let the stuff burn up in reentry. There were engineering studies done that indicated they could have been used for many things, from habitats, to raw materials.

[Moonman62]

The shuttle was a nice try at reusability, but in practice fell far short. The main fuel tank (orange) was completely expendable. The solid rocket motors (white) were recovered, but the amount of repair work needed to use them again put the price of reuse to be not much less than building new ones. The orbiter was the reusable part, but even it had to go through very expensive repairs and checks between flights.

I remember FReeper Physicist once saying that it would be cheaper to launch a new Hubble telescope than to do a repair mission.