There's a lot of weird technology that's suited to space and not earth, and vice versa. The shuttle had the equivalent of an intel 386 on it as I recall - powerful enough to run the systems, but chunky and old and tested enough that the transistors in the IC, onboard cache, RAM are sufficiently massive to not be easily flipped by stray cosmic rays passing by. Which we don't have to contend with on earth.. or at least at the magnitude of this threat outside the van-allen belts. The newer tech has to be shielded really well or it will fail for that reason.. tiny transistors will flip states at the slightest provocation.

Circuit boards that run hot and are based on regular solder formulations will also 'spike' really badly in zero-g, basically shortening the life of the equipment. Softened lead/tin floats around really easy and bridges to nearby pads on the board, shorting things out. And the newer equipment packs these much closer together, like transistors on the chips they mount. So are more susceptible to failing in space.

The adage of the soviet-era tanks that fielded valves and so were naturally EMP resilient compared to the US tanks of similar vintage that had ICs that shorted out in a nuke pulse is instructive.. sometimes the older stuff works better for entirely unanticipated reasons.

With that said, loving the future-looking tech that Elon is trying very hard to bring to a useful form of reliability and function. It cant be easy seeing your pricey prototypes go boom, get excoriated on the social media, and dust yourself off and do it again. Tough like Trump is in a way, not giving up.

Same thoughts here. Now we know its because commies infiltrated our nation a long time ago. Golden Age incoming!

We could, we had little reason too.

The tech progressed, but the machining to build more Saturn V's degraded. Plants no longer contracted for parts retooled for other projects.

Eventually restarting requires restarting from the beginning. There was barely a reason to build more Saturn V's at the end ... Ten to twenty years later even if interest had returned it wouldn't have returned enough to justify the cost of the rocket AND redoing all the upfront costs as well.

And hell, if you're starting from scratch you might as well use modern technology and not the 1960's plans. Which is what was floated plenty of times, but the cost was always too high.

Being able to land the rocket is an enormous cost savings. The tech has finally advanced enough the make the cost/benefit equation doable in an age where the bonus incentive of 'first' has long been removed from the table.