On 8/3/2010 5:56 AM, Joseph Nebus wrote:

As I recall there was some thinking in early development of the
Shuttle that White Sands, New Mexico, would be a rather good launch site
allowing for convenient equatorial and polar orbits and also being a
nifty landing site right away. But there was no hope of selling a whole
brand-new launch complex when NASA had barely got done painting the
Vehicle Assembly Building, so, that idea died swiftly.

(And it would turn out to be not so good as a landing site
anyway.)

That would have worked for the Faget concept with the winged booster,
but the chosen design had those two SRBs to recover, and water was a lot
softer than sand to touch them down on. ;-)

Pat