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What a bizzare comparison. The shuttle isn't a fighter jet and and has nothing to do with this. The question is what military value does the F-35 provide, and will provide, during its operational years. Nothing about the history of the shuttle program can possibly give us an answer to this question, and the entire comparison is absurd.

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I think the basis of comparison is that both projects would have been better off with a more focused mission scope. In the case of the shuttle, it should have focused on launch and return of human crews and left BDRs to launch payloads. In the case of the F-35, the branch-of-service requirements were sufficiently different that individual platforms should have been developed to address each specific need.

Even if that were the case (and I seriously doubt that splitting the F-35 into multiple platforms would have resulted in a smaller budget, reduced development time, or better overall value. At the very least it's not trivial that that would be the case), it tells us absolutely nothing about the value of the F-35 compared to the Shuttle. I have kitchen gadgets that attempt to do too many thing at once and would have fared better as separate devices. They are cheaper than the F-35, so I guess the F-35 must be a failure.

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