>>1477089>>1477087Those deaths didn't involve the Soyuz rocket at all. How is that cherrypicking? We're not comparing the US and Soviet space programs as a whole, but the Soyuz rocket to the Space Transportation System. What you're doing is like arguing that Apollo 13 means that the shuttle is dangerous, or that the loss of Columbia shows that the ISS is a deathtrap.
They reflect the practices of ground crew, not anything about the Soyuz spacecraft, as shown by the absence of fatalities during almost fifty years of operations. If you think that's meaningful, that it shows that Russians are bumbling fools or whatever, it only makes twice losing the super-American, super-tech, super-complex orbiters look that much worse.
To get back to prototype/concepts, McDonnell-Douglas Fall 1971 booster concepts. NASA held to some variant of first-stage reuse as long as it could, but in the face of an OMB that refused to fund it and was leaning towards a small glider atop a Titan-III, NASA relented and moved towards a one and one half stage design, though with liquid boosters. Solid boosters would be chosen after another budget cut.
It was known by OMB and maybe Congress that all these decisions to lower development costs would make operations down the line more expensive, but government accounting includes hefty discounting of future costs.
