The first flight of the Shuttle was in 1981 and it retired in 2011…
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Didn’t really question it (thought it was a generic rocket), but it’s cool that it’s based on something!
Me too - it was glorious… 
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This might explain the process more:
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Re the OP, yes I think it’s strange to have a Shuttle launch as background art, and I don’t like it.
I know it looks cool, and many if us grew up thinking that everything NASA did was the greatest. But the Shuttle was a turkey of a vehicle. Costing billions to build, it was supposed to make spaceflight much cheaper, safer and easier. It did none if those things. Not only was it a technological dead end, but it still holds NASA back today: NASA has spent billions every year for the last two decades on its Shuttle-derived Space Launch System (SLS) while SpaceX, RocketLab and others have developed much better rickets for a small fraction of the cost. The purpose of SLS is not to go to space but to funnel tax dollars to certain congressional districts.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive spaceflight enthusiast. But the Shuttle is the symbol of what’s gone wrong with NASA.
Actually there was a reason for the shuttle, it could lift and deploy very heavy payloads. It was meant to be used for building stations in orbit and for their maintenance. The idea of it being “cheap” came from the other idea of it being “reusable” and, again, it was the premise for frequent flights in order to colonize orbit and beyond.
Unfortunately it was too complicated, I guess it is the most complex vehicle ever build and the stress of launch and re-entry was too severe to allow easy reconditioning.
Please note that the “reusable” idea is still pursued by SpaceX and I don’t know how cheaper the rockets and the capsules are despite being much simpler than the shuttle.
I agree, the Shuttle did have a formally defined purpose: it was to be an all-purpose space truck replacing all other launch vehicles. It failed miserably and wasn’t even a step in the right direction. As you note, other organizations are making reusablility work now, but nobody is pursuing anything like the Shuttle (except arguably Sierra Nevada Corporation with its Dream Chaser, but that is years behind schedule and has at best a very cloudy future).
It is the SLS derivative of Shuttle that was created with little purpose other than keeping federal money flowing to the Shuttle ecosystem.
That shuttle didn’t sound worth it 
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It id not fail, it did fly and it did deliver cargo in orbit.
It wasn’t as cheap and as safe as advertised.
The question could be “did people at NASA know it wasn’t cheap and safe and did they kept it running regardless?”
Probably, yes, because at that point there wasn’t any other option.
There is a main problem: is space esploration and colonization still a goal the USA and the world all toghether should pursuit? If not, NASA should be much smaller with a smaller budget for just sending scientific probes. I can imagine NASA wanting to survive at any cost, then pushing even wrong ideas just for keeping the wheel turning.
Not really..
Feels appropriate to me considering Fedora also brought back a relic of a contributor as the new Fedora Project Leader. But I may have a unique perspective on that.
That reminds me, I still have a space shuttle LEGO set that needs building..the set initially released in 2021 with the hubble telescope payload..also kinda of a relic now too I guess now that the webb is out there.
Anyways… I probably should go do some stretching cuz I’m old.
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Honestly, I’m OK with it. The Space Shuttle didn’t succeed at what it was supposed to succeed at, I suppose, but it did help build the ISS and advanced space science. One could have worse things to look up to.
Whenever I see the Space Shuttle, I think about the Challenger blowing up. Then I wonder if the Fedora Project’s trying to imply that the Challenger’s destruction should be conflated with Fedora 43… as if it’s referencing that old copypasta about 42 from Hitchhiker’s Guide meaning “death.”
Actually two shuttles were lost with all hands, one while lifting up and the other while re-entering.
Life is risky, lots of people die every day at work, while driving a car, climbing mountains, sailing the seas, even eating a cake because of allergies.
The problem is not that the Shuttle killed two of its crews but that it killed crews at a rate not statistically different from earlier generations of spacecraft.
The whole point of the Shuttle, the justification for the billion$ spent on it, was that it was going to be far safer, cheaper and more reliable than what had gone before. It failed on all counts.
Actually not. I mean, that was the “justification” given to the general public and it was part of a bigger stotytelling about space colonization. But whoever has got some critical thinking, let alone technical expertise, knew such a big and complex machine, frequently flying and even worse, not disposable like traditional vehicles, was very expensive and potentlially dangerous.
For example, each flight took double the people of the Apollo missions, so an accident killed more, plus there wasn’t any escape manouver during ascending and no bail out during reentry, which, since the vehicle had to glide and land instead of just crash anywhere, was way less forgiving (in fact todays “advanced” vehicles do the same as the Apollo capsules, parachutes and splash down, nobody tried to soft land a manned craft).
My conclusion is both NASA engineers and crews knew of the risks but they went on the same because they thought sending people in space was risky in any case. About the costs, it is secondary until the State provides funds and that goes on until the storytelling appeals the population.
I would also add that once the shuttles were dismissed, NASA lost almost any capability and today it can only manage the same as the ancient soviet Soyuz vehicles. Yes, the Starship could do better but it keeps failing (besides, I don’t think it is meant to launch and land on its own power, looks like the same “storytelling”).
Some people outside the government were talking about space stations and colonization, but NASA wasn’t. The government itself must have believed at least some of the promises made for the Shuttle, otherwise the national security establishment would not have redesigned its extremely expensive satellites for launch by the Shuttle, production of expendable launch vehicles would not have been terminated, and the US Air Force would not have created a cadre of payload specialists for military missions.