The “assumed” missions listed above are probably pretty well right on target.
Wait for a Chinese copy soon. (Thanks to Clinton.) We could have been working on this since the Dynasoar (dinosoar?) re-entry vehicles were dreamed up in the early 60’s ....)
My understanding is that NASA originally wanted the small sized orbiter, that was capable of high orbit (perhaps able to reach 130,000 miles away from Earth. But the military demanded they build the large sized "Dynosaur" orbiter to handle large packages in near-Earth low orbit (only reaching a few hundred miles away).
If not for military intervention, we could have had a beautiful little platform Like the X-37B operational in the 1980s capable of high-Earth orbit, and that would have allowed us to perhaps have a space station in geo-synchronous orbit halfway to the Moon by this time.
During the development of a “reusable” vehicle system that grew into the STS, one proposal was a two-stage vehicle that took off and landed as a plane; the first stage was to be a much larger winged vehicle that would haul the orbiter/reentry vehicle to high altitude using aerodynamics to save fuel and simplify recycling for the next flight. We wound up with a rocket-launched system, with the liquid-fueled “main” engines drinking out of a tank that was not reusable, and were dead weight, riding back to Earth in an area protected by the reentry plasma. Most of the pop comes from those SRBs.
Thanks Robert A. Cook, PE!
They should of never cancelled Dynasoar.