Reply #17: By those criteria, the shuttle was a failure.

[laconicsax]

It was promised to get the job done for $50 million per flight and wound up costing $450 million. If you're going to talk about success given budget constraints, it was a total failure.

Really. If you get a contract to do a job for a specific budget and when it's all said and done, you've only done 1/7 of the job for $725 million more than promised, you failed.