This has been debunked already.

Also, please do not post articles in their entirety, it violates copyright
law.


--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.

wrote in message
...
source:
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/...d_Not_999.html

If X-20 had actually flown in the late 1960s, that instrumentation
would have supplied the Shuttle's designers with a priceless data
base. They would not have been forced to rely completely on wind-
tunnel data and primitive computer models and would have produced a
better design. For instance, the Orbiters carry two tons of lead
blocks in their noses to compensate for an error in aerodynamic
models, and X-20 data might well have prevented this mistake.

It is even possible that X-20 would have convinced NASA and USAF
management that a winged vehicle was the wrong way to go - that the
operational problems and parasitic weight were just too crippling to
be worth the supposed advantages of high cross-range capability and
runway landing.

Many people came to realize this unpleasant truth during the test
flights of Columbia in 1981-82, by which time it was politically
impossible to abandon the Shuttle or cut it back to an X-program.
Since then, spaceplanes have been rejected in favor of semi-ballistic
capsules every time they have competed for the same mission, most
recently in the Hermes/ARD, Kliper/ACTS, and OSP/Orion programs.

So this is my own alternate aerospace history fantasy: If there had
been a few X-20 flights, and the data base from these flights had been
available in 1971, it is possible that we could have avoided the whole
Space Shuttle fiasco? Might we have stuck with capsules instead of
getting lost in a blind alley? Could Dyna-Soar have saved us 14 dead
astronauts and over $100B of wasted money? Could we have spent the
last 35 years doing something useful in space, if that useless little
black spaceplane had actually flown?