What could have been decades ago to low earth orbit!

[Atlan0001]

A second-generation craft could have taken flight from surface into low earth orbit:

Lockheed X-24C: The Hypersonic Mach 8 Plane Explained in 3 Words

What You Need to Know: The Lockheed L-301, also known as the X-24C, was an ambitious experimental hypersonic aircraft project in the 1970s that aimed to build upon the advancements of the X-15 and X-24B programs. -Designed to reach speeds of Mach 8 and perform hypersonic skip-glide maneuvers...

nationalinterest.org

Common flights to low Earth orbit just a daily routine by 2024CE. . . Oh well, what might have been ....

 

[Atlan0001]

We (rather Nixon and Congress) abandoned the Moon in 1973, and we (Carter and Congress) abandoned a possible prototype of a plane to low Earth orbit in 1977. Since then, we abandoned the potentiality of artificial gravity stations in orbit and beyond (ISS opening nothing, advancing nothing really for eight billion people!). And, saved no economy and no money whatsoever in the doing . . . rather the non-doing in the non-opening of the frontier universe. $37,000,000,000,000 sunken in national debt, accelerating in a negative expansion of negative energies (money is no more than a token of energies), in an Iron Curtain negative of closed systemic Earth only.