Replacing Past Shuttle Missions with Rockets and Things

I finished reading This New Ocean about a month ago. Two of its main
themes are how the space industry and the military are interlocked and wound
tightly together. The other theme is the group of people who supported the
"manned" missions to space and the moon vs. the scientists who thought
sending men to space was a waste of money and resources; scientist who
thought research could be done better and cheaper with pilotless rockets and
satellites.

This has me wondering about the space shuttle. In the part about the
Challenger explosion the author mentions how sad it was and how big a blow
it was to space flight and all that, and of course the speech Reagan gave
that night. But the author also says no one said anything about the payload
in the shuttle (a spy satellite I think) and that it could actually have
been deployed on a rocket. So basically, the deaths of the astronauts were
a waste.

So my question: how many of the missions the shuttle went on could actually
have been done with pilotless rockets? Besides the "human" experiments in
space could the shuttle have been replaced with rockets for most of it's
missions? What about the all important military spy satellites and such?
Could all of that have been done by rockets?

How about a percentage of total shuttle missions that could have been
replaced with unmanned missions? 50% More or less?

"Steen" wrote in
. dk:

Von Fourche wrote:

speech Reagan gave that night. But the author also says no one said
anything about the payload in the shuttle (a spy satellite I think)

Challenger carried a TDRS-satellite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDRS

and that it could actually have been deployed on a rocket. So

Of course. That goes for all satellites, the Shuttle has brought up.

Except for the ones they brought back (or intended to bring back, like
Spartan-Halley, which was also on Challenger). There is currently no other
spacecraft capable of retrieving spacecraft like the shuttle can.

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JRF

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On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:10:54 -0600, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

There is currently no other
spacecraft capable of retrieving spacecraft like the shuttle can.

....And I've gotten the impression that with CEV there *won't* be that
sort of capability. I could see, perhaps, a cargo return version, but
there's the issue of soft landing vs the semi-hard one we're going to
see when CEV becomes operational. The Shuttle provides this.

OM
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