WHY DID THE US DEVELOP THE SPACE SHUTTLE
WHEN THE SATURN 5 IS SO MUCH BETTER?
The Space Shuttle has a lift off thrust of 6.6 million pounds.

The Saturn 5 Boosters have a lift off thrust of 7.5 million pounds.

The Space Shuttle can take into low earth orbit payloads of up to 40,000 pounds.

The Saturn 5 could take a 100,000 pound load into high altitude orbit. The complete lunar lander weighed 100,000 pounds and a Saturn 5 rocket apparently took it all the way to the moon (way beyond high altitude orbit).

This means that the Saturn 5 can carry 280,000 pounds into low earth orbit.

So, one Saturn 5 launch is equivalent to SEVEN Space Shuttle launches. You only have to launch one Saturn 5 to carry the same payload to low earth orbit (say, in order to build the international space station) as SEVEN Shuttle launches.

Which would be cheaper, researching, developing and using the Space Shuttle, or just using the existing Saturn 5's to haul SEVEN times as much gear into space.

Something, smells in the land of the US of A. Something, smells real bad,....

Isn't it curious that the Russians, Europeans and the Chinese all have cheap expendable launch vehicles with which to launch satellites, yet the US (with all its Saturn 5 experience and technology behind it) does not.

And, did you notice the embarrassing run of failures (the rockets blew up) that the US had (in the 90's) when it attempted to develop its own expendable launch vehicles (no, the US did not use the Saturn 5 (or even some derivative vehicle) for some unexplained reason) in order to compete with the Chinese, French and Russians in satellite launching business.

A quote:

The shuttle is really the most complicated vehicle ever to orbit the Earth and it is the most expensive. The number of missions, originally predicted to be more than fifty a year, quickly fell to about eight while the operational and development costs rose as quickly as the vehicle leaving the launch pad. These costs are often even more expensive than the expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) that the space shuttle was supposed to supplant as the main road to space.