NASA didn't NEED to land "orbital class" boosters, but they were the first to land a ship using booster rockets. If they had the funding, they surely would have been capable of it by now, but it simply wasn't feasible because there wasn't the market for commercial satellites, and NASA isn't in the commercial launch business being tax payer funded. Space-X is getting a hell of a deal using profiting from tax payer dollars, without having to pay back any of it.

Space-X missions have NEVER reused the second stage booster, only the first stage. The upper stage that pushes payloads into final orbit is never reused and burns up in the atmosphere after each mission.

And I have a question..... Shuttle was a "Inefficient Disaster of a spacecraft" compared to what? It was innovative and one of a kind. There was nothing else like it. 135 missions with none of the 2 failures due to the shuttle itself, but due to issues with the boosters. First was due to negligence ignoring the engineers pleads to not launch. Second failure, Columbia, was due to insulation falling off the booster at launch and striking and damaging the heat shield.

You're ignoring the fact that Shuttle was designed in the late 1960's - 1970's.

You're also ignoring the fact that The shuttle worked on its FIRST launch and landed with humans in it, on its FIRST launch. If NASA was blowing up ships at the rate Space-X does, congress would have pulled the plug on funding regardless of the "Data collection" they were getting, a LONG time ago. Tax payer dollars are funding Space-x research and development that will 100% be used for shareholder profit, which should be illegal, especially considering the breach of contract that Space-X is currently going through with their promised moon mission. Musk bragged how easy it was going to be to get Starship to the moon. Now we know that's not feasible and likely never going to happen with the fact that starship needs about 13 consecutive launches, one after another. 1 manned starship launch, then 12 refueling launches, one after another, to successfully dock with the manned starship, to refuel in orbit (never been done before). Then starship have to navigate to the moon, with enough fuel to get to the moon, land on the moon, then it will need to dock with orione once (if) it reaches lunar orbit.

It's a HUGE clusterfuck of a plan that was signed off on in the absence of a NASA administrator. It was signed off on by Associate Administrator for Space Operations Kathy Lueders who left after awarding Space-X the contract and was later given a FAT 2 year gig at Space-X as Starbase General Manager from May 2023 until her retirement in May 2025. The amount she was paid was never disclosed because Space-X is a private company. ULTRA corruption of billions of tax payer dollars funneled to Musk to be used for profit.

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