AH Challenge: Lunex, not Apollo

[Workable Goblin]

If you were selling gum, and priced only at marginal cost, you'd lose money because you'd never be able to pay for factory upgrades, janitorial service, maintenance, R&D, or the biggest item, long-term labor.

Well, if you produce gum you are presumably not subject to bad design decisions that limit your ability to manufacture gum to a point where the price of maintaining your gum factories is a significant part of your overall costs. Also, I'm not sure what planet you're living on, but here on Earth gum manufacture is probably as close to a perfect competition environment as you can get, meaning that the price of a stick of gum is extremely close to the marginal cost of that gum (less externalities, of course).

I assure you, Russia and Virgin are starting their profit margins from total expected costs. Why should we price Shuttle launches differently? Among other problems, it fails to rightly cost those high, postflighting costs.

Actually, the marginal costs approach doesn't, since the whole point is it takes into account the cost of launching "one more"--which includes post-launch refurbishment costs. As for Russia, any assertion that their prices have any close relationship to their overall costs is utterly laughable, as enormous parts of the their development costs and some parts of their operational costs (such as operating Baikonur or Plesetsk or even Kourou) are either sunk costs paid by a completely different entity or ongoing costs also paid by a completely different entity, not to mention the whole shebang being subsidized by the Russian government, whereas the Shuttle has to take all the burden of those costs onto itself. Virgin is probably following GAAP, which call for writing off current costs against current income, meaning that Galactic flights will not be paying for their own development costs--again, unlike the Shuttle's accounting. Furthermore, also like the Russians and unlike the Shuttle, Virgin does not have to pay for its infrastructure, which is instead being built and maintained by local governments wanting a piece of the space pie. Probably the only commercial launch company that actually had to pay the whole cost of the infrastructure was Sea Launch, and, well, that didn't go so well. You really should read that article I linked about how these things are determined.

If you're a space nut, you're doing your cause no service. The way to progress is via facts, even if they're painful. Every man-made thing and system has defects and problems to overcome, that are important to understand so the next thing you build's better.

Sure. And somehow, you keep missing the point I was trying to make, which is that the failure of the Space Shuttle was not strongly linked to the cost of the TPS. Instead, "the fact they can't get anywhere near to the maximum flight rate (24/year, dictated by Michoud's ability to manufacture ETs) and a flawed design driven (ironically) by their desire to cut costs [are] the main factor leading to the Shuttle's high operations cost...", once again. Basically:
1. They can't fly at their maximum theoretical flight rate, which would drive the cost number you quoted much closer to the marginal cost
2. This is because of mismanagement and a flawed design.
3. The very time-consuming refurbishment of the TPS (but not the actual costs of doing so) are an important part of the low flight rate, but not the only cause.
You for some reason keep ignoring the facts and evidence I bring up in the service of that point.

By the way, if you check out the X-series' later history, you'll see that one was devoted to trying another way of dealing with spaceplanes' heat troubles (maybe also with a ramjet in case of success?). It failed.

Okay, so which would that be?:
X-20: Never built due to budget cuts; McNamara didn't care about military space. The related ASSET program was intended to evaluate TPS schemes for that program, and worked perfectly; aside from the launch vehicle failure on flight 2, each successfully reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic, though two of them suffered failures in the buoyancy systems that prevented a planned recovery.
X-23: Worked fine, validated lifting-body reentry. While the only recovered test article (two had parachute failures) was evaluated as able to be reused, it used a conventional ablative TPS.
X-30: Never built due to post-Cold War budget cuts and an overly ambitious design. (BTW, this is one of those "waveriders" you were talking about. We'll see them again...)
X-33: Never built due to declining performance, failures of key systems, and massive overruns unrelated to TPS design. Never flew.
X-34: Never built due to disputes between the contractors and NASA related to the costs of development and engine choice. To the best of my knowledge, this did not involve TPS design.
X-37: Currently in orbit. No failure thus far.
X-38: Never built due to budget cuts and redirection after Columbia disaster.
X-40: X-37 prototype. Successful.
X-41: Classified.
X-43: Scramjet testbed. Successful. A waverider (in fact, a scaled-down X-30)
X-51: Not yet flown. One of your "waveriders".

I notice a distinct lack of TPS-related failures on that list... (Not to mention the lack of any missions except the X-23 and ASSET, both of which were completely successful, even vaguely similar to your description...what was that about "facts", again?)