See the selection from a TRW aerospace report from 1967; the author of the blog–didn’t find his name–suggests that the data may date from 1961.
Definitely a fun blog.
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=28998
(My in line URL insert thingie is broken on this browser.)
On paper reusable vehicles look great, but the devil is in the details.
First, there’s developmental risk. A winged booster is extremely sensitive to weight overruns. To give an early example the X-20/ Dynasoar glider was originally supposed to be boosted by a modified Titan II rocket; but as the design kept getting heavier and heavier that was changed to a Titan III. The payload margin of a space plane can vanish if performance is lower or weight is higher than expected, and then you’re stuck with a design that has to be tossed in the trash and start over. The Shuttle was a compromise design that traded full reusability for lower developmental risk.
Alas, the Space Shuttle! When it first flew in 1980 there were such hopes for it. But the second problem kicked in: for a reusable vehicle to be economical, you have to reuse it. Specifically the development costs and the infrastructure to maintain the program have to be spread over the greatest possible number of launches, and the Shuttle never achieved its promised turnaround time of one month per vehicle. Constant problems with the engines meant delays and the Challenger disaster set back the whole program for months. Problems with fragile shielding tiles and the “reusable” engines that had to be completely rebuilt every two or three flights were never completely solved. Over the program’s lifetime the amount of money spent on keeping the Shuttle in existence amounted to half a billion dollars per flight. Not a bargain.
Even expendable rockets suffer from the same problem. It costs money simply to maintain the capacity to build them at all, and if you don’t fly the heck out of a particular design (like the Russians have with their R-7 booster), if you fly so few rockets that each is virtually handbuilt, they’re never going to be cheap. The demand has to be there, and until the price comes down there won’t be the demand- the conundrum that’s faced aerospace aviation from the beginning.
BTW: the low price-per-pound cited for the Saturn vehicles is mainly due to economy of scale- the heavy payload diluted the fixed costs of launching any rocket at all.