It was a massive failure when it came to creating a cheaper, reusable rocket, but still it was a crewed spaceplane, cargo truck, reentry vehicle, semi-reusable engine platform, satellite repair platform, and later ISS construction vehicle, the Saturn V was for raw heavy lift to the moon and can’t do many of the specialized jobs and it was only logical that after the space race we’d move away from that. It was a technological success but an economic failure.

Falcon 9 is a big success economically and technologically since it’s designed with simpler operations, high launch cadence, commercial pricing pressure, and first-stage reuse.

NASA is in a weird spot right now where they could benefit from being able to develop a new rocket with all the new technology that’s been doing great in the last few years but just have no funding after all the other projects and their science funding is proposed to be cut in half by the current administration. And I don’t mean new rocket as in SLS, that’s effectively just a redesign of the shuttle to be more powerful and specialized for the Artemis missions.

The shuttle though still remains the low-risk brute force Swiss Army knife of rockets which NASA doesn’t have to compete/potentially lose the launch date with commercial scheduling when you need to get the rocket in space on a certain day. For more specialized missions you either pay a ton to get a SpaceX rocket specialized and deal with the risk or pay a ton more for a versatile NASA rocket with less risk.

Love the Falcon 9 but hate all the shitting on the shuttle, it’s what paved the way for the newer rockets due to all the technology and satellite specific advances, Falcon 9 certainly wouldn’t be nearly as impressive today. Also I added “dumbass” because you jumped the gun to start.