– the true mistake of the Shuttle was…the notion that a single government-operated system could satisfy all space transportation needs of the nation
Absolutely. The DoD has had this problem for a long while too. At the beginning of the UAV development, DoD kept wanting “efficiency” in UAV development by creating one UAV that would do EVERYTHING for EVERYONE. So it had to support what the Air Force wanted a UAV for, and support what SpecOps wanted one for, what Generals wanted one for, what army troops on the ground wanted. And of course, the supposed “efficiency” is now lost under the outrageous SWaP constraints you’ve created.
In the end, UAVs were bought by individual teams, groups, and various elements of the military. Then each one could be specialized to that team’s goal, and they didn’t have to all have the same SWaP requirements. What seemed inefficient (“don’t try to mass produce one UAV for all clients, and don’t bother to coordinate anything about their payloads”) was massively efficient in the long run, because each one-off could be designed and built quickly, tailored to the problem at hand, without needing outrageous foresight.
Now if only the space market would respond in kind…
