The Space Shuttle was originally designed to be a reusable space launch vehicle to carry all kinds of stuff to LEO. The Saturn V was designed to be a one time vehicle to carry man to the moon.
The Space Shuttle was designed to be a universal carrier. You could package up almost anything that would fit into the payload bay and send it up. This included the Space Lab (a manned laboratory in space), satellites, the International Space Station (ISS), and maintenance equipment. For example it was used to repair and maintain the Hubble Space Telescope. At one time they called it a 'space truck', and planned to have weekly launches. Re-engineering the Saturn V to accomplish those goals would have been (and still would be) a major undertaking.
The Shuttle never succeeded the way they were sure it would. It turned out to be much more delicate than they had thought. But trying to re-engineer the Saturn V using modern components would be extremely difficult, and there are already plenty of rockets available to perform the space launches that we are performing now days.
A few days ago I mentioned the Delta IV launch system. This system comes in a number of configurations to accommodate a wide range of payloads. So this is one launch system that works much better than the Saturn V for the launches we do today, which don't require the lift capability of the Saturn V. The Saturn V would be inappropriate for most of the payloads we are sending up now days.
Yes we should work on a new manned vehicle. Things like maintenance on the Hubble just can't be done without a manned presence. Some people claim we can do everything with robots, but it isn't really true. If we send a man up to do some kind of maintenance he can frequently figure out where to kick it to make it work. A robot can't.
Bill Gill
