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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Government contracting is not at all indicative of how the free market works.

Also, the free market would never have built a design like the space shuttle. Pushing very heavy wings and landing gear into space doesn't make sense and never did.

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It was actually the side-mount design that made the least sense. It left the heatshield completely exposed to ice and insulation strikes.

To be fair, the magnitude of that risk was not realized in the design phase. Though one could hardly miss the giant, heavy wings & landing gear and the heavy structure to support it. That was obvious to me at the time, and I often wondered why no article about the shuttle ever mentioned it.

Musk figured out a far better way to make a reusable rocket. All it needs is a bit of extra fuel that is burned at the last second.

(Playing the Lunar Lander game in college, I soon realized that the minimum fuel burn to land it was to fall ballistically and go to full power as late as possible, hitting 0 fps just as one touched down.)

Could they have mounted 2 space shuttles, bottom to bottom, instead?

Where the 2nd space shuttle was the fuel tank, and it lands somewhere down range, and is then transported back to the launch center by barge.

Yes, a crewed fuel tank was one of the designs considered, as was three shuttles (2 crewed tanks + 1 ship) in a triangle. Visit the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum Annex in Virginia if you ever get a chance, there’s an exhibit on all the proposed designs. We got the worst possible one.

Another set of heavy wings and landing gear to push up.

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