"The original plan, ridiculous as it was in hindsight, was for STS to be the sole US launcher of all payloads.
However, after the loss of the Orbiter Challenger only seconds into mission STS-51-L, US policy was changed to only allow the Shuttle to launch scientific and military payloads that required human presence. This destroyed any economic rationale for making STS self supporting or a revenue generator.
The first 4 missions were test flights, so omitting them, you can see that 11 of the 21 "operational" missions before the policy change carried commercial satellite payloads, often multiple, up to 3 comsats per mission. A total of 18 commercial satellites were deployed from the Shuttle. "
SpaceX also does cargo missions to the space station (crew happening next year) which is probably a better $/kg comparison to the space shuttle for some missions:
Sure the Shuttle had unique capabilities and the Falcon rockets aren't better in all ways, but the Shuttle was originally supposed to be a cheap and reusable way for the US to do the majority of its space launches and that turned out to not be its strong suit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions...
Edit:
"The original plan, ridiculous as it was in hindsight, was for STS to be the sole US launcher of all payloads.
However, after the loss of the Orbiter Challenger only seconds into mission STS-51-L, US policy was changed to only allow the Shuttle to launch scientific and military payloads that required human presence. This destroyed any economic rationale for making STS self supporting or a revenue generator.
The first 4 missions were test flights, so omitting them, you can see that 11 of the 21 "operational" missions before the policy change carried commercial satellite payloads, often multiple, up to 3 comsats per mission. A total of 18 commercial satellites were deployed from the Shuttle. "
https://space.stackexchange.com/a/10352
SpaceX also does cargo missions to the space station (crew happening next year) which is probably a better $/kg comparison to the space shuttle for some missions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services#S...
Sure the Shuttle had unique capabilities and the Falcon rockets aren't better in all ways, but the Shuttle was originally supposed to be a cheap and reusable way for the US to do the majority of its space launches and that turned out to not be its strong suit.