I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who works in mission control, monitoring the electrical systems and solar panels for the ISS. She said in her opinion, canceling the shuttle program was the right thing to do because using a space shuttle to fly to the ISS was the equivalent of using a mercedes to drive to the end of your driveway to get mail.
So the space shuttle couldn't even replace the Soyuz for taking people to the space station and back. The Soyuz capsule stays at the space station for the duration people are there so it can be used to get everyone back if needed.
The space shuttle has a maximum mission length of 16 days so it could not fill that same role, while the Soyuz capsule can go about 6 months.
The shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem; the design never really made a lot of sense in the first place. The US would almost certainly have been better pursue a scaled-down Apollo-derivative (ie a Soyuz clone).
>The shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem;
I don't think that's entirely fair. At the time, when it appeared space may become weaponized, it made a lot of sense. A craft that could potentially fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home? Worth the cost and then some many times over.
> fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home
(NB. Provided that it was in an accessible low earth orbit and that very simple countermeasures weren't used)
I mean, realistically, putting a small bomb in each sensitive satellite would be enough to dissuade anyone from trying this, and most sensitive satellites wouldn't be in orbits that the shuttle could make anyway. The military applications always seemed like the most fantastical part of the concept.
>fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home
Except the only country with satellites we would really want to do that to was the USSR, and how many SS launches would the US get to do if there was a nuclear war going on(with Cape Canaveral as one of the first targets)?
