>Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick?
I believe the delta wings were mostly to assist with stability when the shuttle was hypersonic.
>Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust
Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program has come up with a similar solution in their attempts to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation— use your big brutish solid boosters to get off the ground, in conjunction with your less powerful but more efficient liquid ones. Since they burned for ~4x as long as the solids, I think the RS-25 engines actually did about the same amount of work while needing a lot less fuel
>What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload
I would think it's less "deploying a payload" and more like retrieving one (which is actually alluded to later in this article). When the shuttle was being designed, the US was still taking satellite reconnaissance photos on film, which was then returned to Earth and scooped up by a plane. Being able to put more film in your satellite would save a lot of money, as would being able to develop film without having to send one of your half dozen retrieval pods back to Earth.
>the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry
Was this requirement only from the Air Force? How far would they have need to go cross-range to support the shuttle's various abort modes? It's not like you have a lot of other options in the area if you can't make it to the runway on Ascension Island.
The large wings are specifically to support a particular Air Force mission profile. They wanted to be able to do a polar launch (requiring a bigger rocket than equatorial launches to start with), grab a Soviet satellite, then land the vehicle after just one orbit.
After one polar orbit, the Vandenburg base would have moved east about a thousand miles, so the Shuttle would have to fly a thousand miles cross-range to get back to it's runway. Hence the big delta wings.
The Air Force never managed to get the Vandenburg facility commissioned, so the Shuttle never few any polar missions. If those requirements had been ditched, the Shuttle could have been small enough have been built on a vertical stack with a lot more flexibility in abort modes.
Do you have more info than that? Most of the links in the article's sources are dead and I'm not familiar with that requirement. I didn't even realize that the USSR put things in polar orbits (as opposed to Mulniya). Speaking of the USSR, I think Bran's wings were even bigger than the shuttle's. Was that just a case of copy-and-paste design?
And did that cross range ability reduce the number of abort sites that NASA needed to maintain?
Molniya orbits put the satellite at a relatively high altitude when it's over the target area, compared to a low polar orbit. If you absolutely have to get the highest resolution close up photos possible of a whole bunch of Capitalist military sites all over the world, low polar is the way to go, or at least was back when the Shuttle was designed.
Molniya orbits are best thought of as an alternative to geostationary orbits, for applications requiring sustained coverage over large areas up north.
I believe the delta wings were mostly to assist with stability when the shuttle was hypersonic.
>Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust
Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program has come up with a similar solution in their attempts to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation— use your big brutish solid boosters to get off the ground, in conjunction with your less powerful but more efficient liquid ones. Since they burned for ~4x as long as the solids, I think the RS-25 engines actually did about the same amount of work while needing a lot less fuel
>What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload
I would think it's less "deploying a payload" and more like retrieving one (which is actually alluded to later in this article). When the shuttle was being designed, the US was still taking satellite reconnaissance photos on film, which was then returned to Earth and scooped up by a plane. Being able to put more film in your satellite would save a lot of money, as would being able to develop film without having to send one of your half dozen retrieval pods back to Earth.
>the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry
Was this requirement only from the Air Force? How far would they have need to go cross-range to support the shuttle's various abort modes? It's not like you have a lot of other options in the area if you can't make it to the runway on Ascension Island.