Clark Lindsey, on more clueless commentating from the MSM:

In science it is not considered a valid technique to generalize from a single data point. The same is true for judging RLVs. The Space Shuttle, which is not really reused but rather is rebuilt between flights, has innumerable design flaws and shortcomings far too extensive and numerous to go into here. Predicted to become the DC-3 of launchers, to call it even the Ford Tri-Motor of launchers would be an insult to that historic plane. (Ball also mentions the X-15 but it was a experimental development program, not an operational system. It should be compared to the SS1 not the SS2.)

Commercial spaceflight vehicles are being designed and built with the goal of low cost operations rather than highest possible performance. Low cost operations can only arise when high reliability and robustness are designed into the systems from the ground up. Those features in turn will produce safe rides for the crews and passengers. (I'll note that it will be easier to achieve safe and routine operations for suborbital spaceflight but eventually the lessons learned there will be applied to orbital systems.)

One runs into this illogic often in space discussions, as though the Shuttle proves anything at all about reusable vehicles in general.

Though it's not as bad as that Alex Tabarrok piece a while back.

I think it's incorrect to disqualify the Shuttle as an RLV merely because it requires a lot of rebuilding between flights. If this had been a sane world, the Shuttle would have been much more limited in scale, and we'd have been flying for a decade or more successors to the Shuttle. Maybe these would have been RLV or not.

Along those lines, I'd classify the Shuttle as a somewhat weak existence proof. Namely, that one can build a flyable RLV.

The point is not whether or not we should consider the Shuttle an "RLV" (an acronym, and phrase, that I hate).

The point is a simple one of logic. One should not draw grand conclusions from a single (flawed) example.

I have always thought of the shuttle as a 'Taint'.

It taint an ELV and it taint an RLV either.