vroom = designated Canadian bomb thrower
(just kidding)
Good laugh though…
Well, the shuttle made it up safely. Yay!
For those not on the up and up about Canada’s contribution, the Canadarm will be used during the mission by the shuttle crew to inspect all critical surfaces of the shuttle’s exterior. So there. 
Oh, and (French) Canadian astronaut Julie Payette is on board.
here’s some food for thought, the shuttle was originally thought up as a space plane in the 1950s called the “Dyna-Soar”
Ironically the Dyna-Soar and the shuttle are VERY close in their overall design, as the shuttle started being designed during the end of the Apollo Era, which took place in the late 60’s and early 70’s. So technically, the shuttle is not a tin can from the 80s, it’s from the 70s.
The Shuttle is an aerodynamic BRICK. Imagine having to enter the atmosphere around 22,000 mph in either a streamlined wave-rider, or on a brick. One will have a hot zone on it where there is high amounts of gaseous friction, the other will have an entire surface get incredibly hot (the shuttle has this problem, or is it solution?). The idea back in the day was that the shuttle would operate on the ‘brick’ idea to help slow it down in a timely fashion. In all fairness, designing a wedge shape for re-entry that would have a lower operating temperature range would be a real bitch to land (same problem with the concord, and it only went mach 2, which is about a 1/15th that of the shuttle). It’s all about compromise, so they made a landable brick. Remember also that the original idea was to have a shuttle that would be launched every 2 to 3 weeks, and to make it affordable, it would be mostly reuseable, whoops, that didn’t happen, but hindsight is 20/20.
As for the X-33 and the VentureStar, I think we’re many years (40?) from ever seeing anything like that get into space. Having a one stage to orbit heavy lifter is just not feasible right now, unless you were to consider nuclear rocketry (this was explained to me by a professor, who actually was the last person to write their phd thesis on nuclear rocket propulsion, so he knows a thing or two!) Simply said, rockets don’t have a high enough specific impulse to get them into orbit on one stage, or else they would need to be gargantuan just in order to carry the fuel for such an endevor, but the payload ratio would be VERY small, so small it really wouldn’t be more than the rocket it’s self.
Moving onto lifting bodies… that’s a nice idea, it’s been a nice idea since NASA started fooling around with them in the 50s. There has been a lot of improvements and hype, but don’t hold your breath.
Scramjets… a lot of people think this will get us into space on the next rocketplane, the technology to make a big enough scramjet to power a large rocketplane is about 25 years away, maybe in the shuttle replacement’s replacement.
What I do think will work… think about the X-prize and spaceship one baby! NASA needs to develop another way to get a rocket through the thick and slow part of the atmosphere. Spaceship 1 did this as I had visioned as a little kid, why not use an airplane to lift your rocket up to a height and speed, drop it off and then let it go with some momentum? Granted you would need a very large and specialized aircraft for this job, but why not, it’s gotto be cheaper than using all that rocket fuel to get to the same height. The trick will be in finding a better way for re-entry, a lower drag/lower heat version, or something far less complex than the space shuttle (this could mean going back towards capsules). If NASA wants to go back to safety, the capsule idea worked great. If they want a reuseable rocket plane, they need to do it right!
BARR, what all did you do while at NASA? Enlighten the AeroStallion
[quote]CU AeroStallion wrote:
Remember also that the original idea was to have a shuttle that would be launched every 2 to 3 weeks, and to make it affordable, it would be mostly reuseable, whoops, that didn’t happen, but hindsight is 20/20.
[/quote]
The original plans called for a much smaller shuttle, but the pentagon added the requirement that it’d be able to carry a 65,000lbs payload. That made for a much larger and complicated shuttle.
It also lost the ability to go above low-earth orbit (LEO) complicating the matter for satellites that need to be deployed in higher orbits. (They use booster rockets from the shuttle, or launch from the ground using conventional Saturn-V rockets).