I commend SpaceX for the work they've done to reduce the costs, but it's not particularly fair to compare to the Shuttle program for several reasons:

1) SpaceX employs engineers who worked on the Shuttle, thus getting all of their lessons learned for free.

2) SpaceX gets to use facilities NASA built, like launchpads and testing facilities much more cheaply than if they had to build their own facilities. They tested their heat shields at NASA Ames, for example.

3) Everything is cheaper now. Not just raw materials, but imagine the cost savings when every engineer has a (Shuttle Era) supercomputer on their desk. Testing is dramatically less expensive.

4) Everything is better now. The (NASA developed) heat shields are much higher performance than those available in the Shuttle era. The level of computer control is much more sophisticated. Better technology means you can do more with less.

In short, SpaceX has massive, massive advantages over the original Shuttle team. I would hope that they could do more, more safely, at less cost.

I'm not sure what role the word "fair" plays in this argument. Why is it unfair to learn from a predecessor's mistakes or take advantage of progress since then? What matters is actual results.

But even if you want to grade on a curve, there's something to be said for appropriate use of what you have. It's easy to argue that the Space Shuttle was not a good design, even given 1970's technology, due to political constraints.

I suppose you could ask, "given both political and technical constraints that NASA was operating under, was it a good design?" but I'm not sure what the goal would be of that question. Is anyone blaming individual engineers for management problems?

If I remember my history correctly, the original shuttle objectives were compromised by US intelligence interests that required the shuttle to attain certain latitudes that were good for launching intel assets? If so, the shuttle program could have been a lot cheaper?

It was even worse. They required ability to fly to polar orbits, plus ability to make single-orbit missions, which meant a lot of cross-range (meaning otherwise unnecessarily heavy wings). To make things worse, nobody ever paid for these features because Air Force bailed out of Shuttle project long before first flight, but when it was too late to delete hardware needed for these now-unnecessary features. Shuttle had terribly bad luck since the beginning.

This speaks more to the colossal clusterfuck that was the overengineered, unreliable Space Shuttle program. Doing it 10x cheaper than the Russians would be a real accomplishment.

To be a bit fair, the shuttle was the only part of a much larger boondoggle that originally involved NASA and the DOD. Its a much better example of mission creep, after reading Richard Feynman's "personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle" after the Challenger explosion shows just how badly the shuttle was designed/pressed into service/etc...

Doing it exactly as cheaply as the Russians would be a real accomplishment. Because it would allow us not to be forced to use the Russians for everything!