On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:56:10 +0000 (UTC), "Fevric J. Glandules"
wrote:

This article about the X-37B:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12...unch_tomorrow/
reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask.

Much has been made (by some) of the military-mandated cross-
range capability of the STS which (according to some) essentially
crippled the Shuttle as a civilian transport due to the excesssively
expensive and fragile TPS.

The given scenario is always a single polar orbit launched from
and returning to Vandenberg. But why not just launch from, say,
White Sands, and land at Vandenberg?

The reason the rocket launch site was moved to Cape Canaveral in the
first place was to prevent spent rocket stages, or rockets destroyed
by range safety, from coming down on land... especially populated
areas.

China and Russia might not think twice about evicting people from
their homes below the intended flight path, and China clearly doesn't
give a hoot if a stage full of toxic propellant does a swan dive into
some remote village (it happened in the 1990s), but the U.S. does.

Other than that philosophical reason against inland launch sites, the
Shuttle's SRBs could not be recovered from a land landing, they'd be
junk afterwards. There might also be issues with where the remains of
the ET would come down.

If you weren't concerned about reusing the SRBs, you could probably
launch the Shuttle from White Sands and be reasonably sure that in a
normal launch the SRBs would impact in a particular area that could be
zoned off. The problem of course, is that you have to prepare for an
abnormal launch, i.e., Challenger raining debris on Santa Fe.

Never gonna happen.

Brian