Retro Rocket

There's news out that India has test launched a mini space shuttle mounted on a rocket. This is just a prototype: the real one will be much bigger, similar to the American Space Shuttle. But building a shuttle isn't too trendy: the US is currently borrowing the (disposable) Russian Soyuz capsule, while working on building their own new spacecraft which is a throwback to the old Apollo design. And the relatively new Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft is a simple disposable similar to Soyuz.

So the Indians may be swimming against the tide. The Space Shuttle concept used to be popular: The Soviets built one (then quickly cancelled it.) And the Europeans and Japanese looked into building small shuttles. But the idea faded.

I guess it's because the American shuttle was disappointing, what with its accidents, expense, and overall failure to make space travel easy and routine. But I don't know that it's necessarily such an inherently bad idea. Whenever I've read anything about the shuttle's design, I've always been amazed at how the expectations where so out-of-line with the actual use. For instance, everyone involved had the assumption it would be going into space at least every week. But the reality was that it never got more frequent than once a month.

Also, the military was heavily involved in the design. You might think that would be because it's the U.S. and the military has to be involved in everything, but it was actually a political play to get congressional support for the Shuttle. The assumption was that shuttles would be constantly needed to launch new military satellites, so the Air Force specified minimum performance requirements. The reality was that there was little military use: disposable rockets were cheaper for launching satellites, and there was never much need for satellites to be launched on a quick ad hoc basis.

The point is that the Space Shuttle was designed for reasons that never came to pass, with abilities that were never used. Though it had to be built with those needs in mind, otherwise it never would have been approved. Confused? Welcome to the American government. So I wonder: if they had an accurate idea of what the Shuttle would be used for, and the political backing to build that, how would that have changed the design, and could they have come up with something far more efficient than what we actually ended up with?

I think it's possible that you could do a better job. The shuttle was always going to have difficulties because of the lack of flights that prevented economies of scale. But combine a nice simple shuttle with the SpaceX self-landing booster and you could have a new level of easy access to space.