On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that the Space Shuttle design was ungainly, looking like a committee designed it, and unfortunately I was right.
(Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)
It was designed to support a specific Air Force requirement: the ability to launch, release or capture a spy satellite, then return to (approximately) the same launch site, all on a single orbit. (I say 'approximately' because a West Coast launch would have been from Vandenberg Air Force Base, returning to Edwards Air Force Base.)
The cargo bay was sized for military spy satellites (imaging intelligence) such as the KH-11 series, which may have influenced the design of the Hubble Space Telescope. Everything else led on from that.
Without those military requirements, Shuttle would probably never have got funded.
I'm listening to "16 Sunsets", a podcast about Shuttle from the team that made the BBC World Service's "13 Minutes To The Moon" series. (At one point this was slated to be Season 3, but the BBC dropped out.) https://shows.acast.com/16-sunsets/episodes/the-dreamers covers some of the military interaction and funding issues.
You're saying the same thing he is, but with more precise examples. There were also plenty of more useless requirements which is what he was getting at with it being 'designed by committee.' It was also intended to be a 'space tug' to drag things to new orbits, especially from Earth to the Moon, and this is also where its reusable-but-not-really design came from.
It's also relevant that the Space Shuttle came as a tiny segment of what was originally envisioned as a far grander scheme (in large part by Werner von Braun) of complete space expansion and colonization. The Space Shuttle's origins are from the Space Transportation System [1], which was part of a goal to have humans on Mars by no later than 1983. Then Nixon decided to effectively cancel human space projects after we won the Space Race, and so progress in space stagnated for the next half century and we were left with vessels that had design and functionality that no longer had any real purpose.
Let alone on launch. It's amusing that NASA is supposed to be this highly conservative safety-first environment, yet went with a design featuring two enormous solid rocket boosters. We knew better than this even during the Saturn era was very much a move fast and break things period of development.
There is nothing wrong with solid rocker boosters for that application. The issue is they failed to figure out figure out the limits and launched when it was too cold. (they also should have investigated when they saw unexpected non-fatal seal issues)
Solid boosters are more complex and so Saturn could not have launched on time if they tried them. So for Saturn with a (arbitrary) deadline not doing them was the right call. Don't confuse right call with best call though: we know on hindsight that Saturn launched on time, nobody knows what would have happened if they had used solid boosters.
I wasn't referencing Challenger in particular. I'm speaking more generally. SRBs are inherently fire and forget. This simply increases the risk factor of rockets substantially, and greatly complicates the risks and dangers in any sort of critical scenario. In modern times when we're approaching the era of rapid complete reuse, they're also just illogical since they're not meaningfully reusable.
Yeah, but that qualifier you put there means I think you need to frame it as "reused." They dragged a couple of giant steel tubes out of the ocean after a salt water bath and then completely refurbished and "reused" them. It's technically reuse, but only just enough to fit the most technical definition of the word, and certainly has no place in the modern goal of launching, landing, inspecting/maintaining (ideally in a time frame of hours at the most), and then relaunching.
The only real benefit of SRBs is cost. They're dirt cheap and provide a huge amount of bang for your buck. But complete reuse largely negates this benefit because reusing an expensive product is cheaper, in the longrun, than repeatedly disposing (or "reusing") a cheap product.
(Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)