My personal comments about the shuttle program is it was idiocy. The useful payload the shuttle could launch into orbit was much smaller than its weight.
The Russians had it right. Big rockets and big payloads with a small reentry vehicle for astronauts. Every pound of the shuttle represented useless weight to orbit.
Holey Cow, you some like some kinda Feynman thinker or somethin’.
That is exactly what that rocket scientist "Bell" said when I read his article in the local paper back in the 1990s.
The wings exerted a side force while it was being lofted aloft. The wings represented dead weight that could have been replaced by greater payload capacity, and so on.
He pointed out dozens of things that were wrong with the very concept of the space shuttle.
I don't remember the guy's full name, but I remember his last name was "Bell", and he formerly worked as a rocket scientist for NASA, and he lived in Hawaii.