J
jschaef5
Guest
How did the idea come to put wings on the space shuttle? I know they wanted to make it reusable and such but seriously, if you are going to launch into space with a rocket why do you want wings. For liftoff its just dead weight. And what aid does it do for landing compared to using parachutes/heat shielding. I could see the need for wings if the shuttle flew up to high altitude and then used its rockets to boost it into space, but when analyizing the components to a shuttle to a 'pod' it seems like a pod would be a much better design. The reason this qusetion comes to me is that the Russians seem to have a very good working rocket to get humans to space.. the Soyez and they are switching to a shuttle type design. And we have a shuttle and are switching to a reusuable pod. It seems like we are going in the right direction. I just don't understand why we would want wings when there are other ways that seem lighter and get the job done just as well. The shuttle design has worked almost flawless to date except for minor ET details but would it not have been cheaper if we had gone with an idea like the CEV a long time ago? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>