Someone explain to me how this is an advancement from the shuttle? It looks like a step back to the 1960s.
Well, sometimes it's the overall approach that's more "advanced" versus the technology behind it. On paper the STS was vastly more capable than Apollo:
-partly reusable vs. the totally expendable Saturn V
-could return a payload from orbit intact
-could land on any runway in its cross range of 10,000 miles instead of needing a vast recovery fleet to pluck it out of the ocean
-more frequent launches should have introduced economies of scale and forced down the cost of each launch
The problem comes in the application.
In order to achieve resuability, STS had to suffer with these extremely fragile silicon tiles which needed to be replaced EVERY time it returned. This required a vast team of workers who would inspect literally every square foot of the exterior. One small mistake and the shield is breached, as happened with the foam strike on Columbia's wing. On the other hand, expendable capsules have a coating on the bottom which simply evaporates, taking the heat with it. For a certain speed and trajectory, you need a certain amount of material, so you just put that much on and, since the capsule is a expendable, you don't have to worry about replacing lost heat shield material. Or if you have a reusable capsule, you can just pull off the heat shield as one unit and put a new one on in one simple operation.
Furthermore, to achieve the return to Earth and cross range capability, the shuttle also had to have those huge delta wings which are dead weight during launch. This impinged upon the cargo capacity and forced NASA to eliminate full re-usability from the booster, not to mention any sort of "optional" crew escape system, something which Apollo had throught its design cycle. The other result of this is that the shuttle combines two disparate roles in one vehicle: moving people (the original reason it was called a "shuttle") and a large payload together into orbit.
The scarcity of payloads large enough to justify launch in that vast cargo bay meant the shuttle could not be used as often as would be necessary to drive down the costs. So instead of dozens of cheap launches per year, we got only 2 or 3 at a princely sum. Granted, the CSM's mission was different from the shuttle, but the Apollo system had both heavy lift and personnel shuttle ability because the Saturn booster was scalable. If you want to launch people into LEO, just put up a CSM on a Saturn 1b. If you want to send people to the moon, or launch a space station (i.e. Skylab), have it ride a Saturn V.
So, every advantage the shuttle was supposed to have over Apollo ended up making it a white elephant. In short, though the capsule approach was and still is primitive compared to the sexy ideas of spaceplanes and SSTO rocketships, it is far more practical and robust, something the shuttle seriously lacked.
Given their experience with the STS, the choice of "Apollo on steroids" seemed the correct one. Ares I replicates the Saturn 1b capability while Ares V would surpass Saturn V's heavy lift capacity. Unfortunately, NASA is required by Congress to use the unreliable solid rocket boosters in whatever new launcher they come up with. This is all to "retain the workforce and technology from the shuttle", i.e. give pork to the Senators with space contractors in their districts. Unfortunately, today there is no single competent voice like Von Braun who was entrusted with overseeing the whole Saturn system from inception to flight.
