Mike Swift wrote in message ...

Another area that is not considered by most engineers developing RLVs
is
that propellents used by most designs are about three orders of
magnitude lower in cost than flight hardware, and that adding
propellent
to reduce the quantity of flight hardware will eliminate any failure
modes that were possible in the eliminated hardware. An example would
be if the Shuttle had no wings there would have been no wing leading
edge failure.

I suppose you mean an approach that is simple is prefered, to make
rlvs possible ? anyway i tend to like "simple" and "clean"
approaches... like thouse of scaled composites and armadillo
earospace. It seems the space shuttle as you meantioned is really
"complex"