Good article. I never understood why we built the shuttle.. it screams of compromise. For what it costs, we should have built a true space plane. Christ, the X-15 could fly into space... if not into orbit... and that was 10 years before we went to the moon!
I really hope we can build a rail gun payload launcher or a space elevator soon. I have no real faith in the X-33 / X-34 type aircraft.... at least this time they got canned before they wasted a ton of money.
Now don't get me wrong, the shuttle is bad-ass, but it was more of an interim solution.. a compromise. Shouldn't we have a better solution by now? It's been 20 years!
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