Keep in mind that refurbishing the waterlogged shuttle boosters ended up being 3X more costly than original estimates, much of the nozzle apparatus was completely trashed each time, and the whole process took months to turn around a single booster.
"ended up being 3X more costly..." you make it sound like the prime contractor didn't know this all along. When you land a cost-plus contract with the government (or anybody, for that matter) your job suddenly becomes to make the contract as costly as possible while still appearing to be executing due diligence. This is why Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, and the other contractors have been able to hoover up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, with only the lame and inefficient STS to show for it. For the amount of taxpayer dollars diverted to the US space program starting with the boondoggle Apollo program PR stunt (yes it was PR. It was all fuck the Russians and their fucking sputnik, we have to one-up the commie bastards by going to the goddamn moon) we could have fixed our social safety net and cured poverty, and put money into useful areas of research, like medicine and energy production/distribution, and fixed our broken education and healthcare systems. Instead, we created a whole new class of welfare client, the aerospace/defense contractor, and managed to keep the Cold War going for 40 more years. Why do you think Tea Party darling Ted Cruz is now the gatekeeper for the US Government's science and technology funding? It's because Musk proved that you don't need a huge fucking corporate welfare system to support basic research. There is also the added political bonus of Musk's achievement discrediting every dollar the US government spent on "space research." One of Cruz's direct responsibilities is overseeing NASA funding, and it is going to be next to impossible to fight his budget cuts when all Cruz has to do is point to Elon Musk's SpaceX success. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is going to be insufferable for a long, long time....