In the 80s, the reusable spacecraft people got sidetracked into SSTO designs, which have horribly small payload fractions. The Delta Clipper and DC-X families w

In the 80s, the reusable spacecraft people got sidetracked into SSTO designs, which have horribly small payload fractions. The Delta Clipper and DC-X families were meant to be reusable, but they never scaled up to something that could deliver decent payloads to orbit.