The Space Shuttle was not really a spaceplane but an unpowered glider with a single shot at landing — it hit the atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound, flew so poorly that astronauts called it a flying brick, and dropped toward the runway on a slope seven times steeper than an airliner’s, with no chance of a second try.

The Space Shuttle was not really a spaceplane but an unpowered glider with a single shot at landing — it hit the atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound, flew so poorly that astronauts called it a flying brick, and dropped toward the runway on a slope seven times steeper than an airliner’s, with no chance of a second try.

The space shuttle has long been a source of controversy among space policy experts, like myself. On the one hand, it ushered in an age of reusable flight in low-Earth orbit (LEO) that was an engineering and scientific marvel.  On the other hand, the space shuttle never quite lived up to its promise.  Space Shuttle Atlantis from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Image Taken by 19FortyFive.com on 6/28/2026. Indeed, in many respects, the shuttle itself …