Such a system could orbit a number of times during maintenance operations of friendly satellites; It would not need the cross-range that the Shuttle was built

Such a system could orbit a number of times during maintenance operations of friendly satellites; It would not need the cross-range that the Shuttle was built for. I get a lot of "Nobody seriously thought this", but the high cross-range required of single-orbit-and-land is the long pole in the tent that stretches the rest of the requirements; It's not a reasonable tradeoff unless espionage was a use-case that could not be ruled out. Without the requirement to land a large cargo bay with an extreme cross-range, the optimal design looks nothing like the Shuttle. The Shuttle cost an order of magnitude more than that optimal design.