Never thought a tail down landing would even be possible.
I recall a Saturday morning, back in the 90s while sitting on my throne, a huge couple of booms. Finished up an went outside....old neighbor hollered back at me, that was the shuttle! All I saw was a trail of whatever. It was very odd.
Anyways my hunting lease was off limits as debris was all over East Texas and Louisiana. Just very chilling. Just kinda freaked me out...
The proof-of-concept for a craft taking off and landing on pure rocket thrust was the DC-X of the 1990s - a program that was killed off by the Clinton Administration in favor of Midnight Basketball Leagues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9cLvYIDPE
The way they did it, since it was a successful program that was running on a shoestring budget and would have been very cheap access to space, was to give it to NASA and tell them that they were considering replacing the Shuttle with the Delta Clipper the DC-X was supposed to lead to. NASA was at the time actively sabotaging any program that looked like it would threaten their pwecious Shuttle, so they arranged an ‘accident’ and duly reported the concept as non-viable so it could be cancelled. They used FUD to kill the spiritual and not-so-spiritual descendant of DC-X, Rotary Rocket, as well as anything else that looked to be viable private space flight. NASA was quite happy.
And then Columbia disintegrated over Texas and the whole program basically died with it, deservedly. Now NASA has to buy rides to space on the spiritual descendants of the private spacecraft they so gleefully tried to kill for so long.
Also, FYI, the Columbia breakup in flight was in *2003.* Dunno what you saw in the 90s, but that wasn’t it.
Columbia…😔