> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and y

> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted it and were willing to fund it. However, the military needs were also what made the space shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much harder all of the current commercial space programs would have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines. So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that killed a bunch of astronauts.