Suppose you were going to use the Shuttle as part of a manned mission to the Moon, my question how is how high of orbit could the shuttle do when it has a normal payload and normal fuel allotment but instead of trying to obtain an orbit it does a suborbital trajectory.
Now what I was thinking is that Shuttle would actually go into an elliptical orbit so that the perigee is high enough not to produce significant drag, it would go into this orbit then dock with another spacecraft- say something from an Ariane V or Delta IVH.
It seems to me that if you are going to the Moon and if you also trying to return to Earth (Shuttle) then a elliptical orbit has some advantages- less fuel needed for shuttle to de-orbit (and if ET is jettisoned at suborbit trajectory it wouldn't require more delta-v to get rid of it- and with some of the fuel used normally to de-orbit shuttle used to get shuttle into the elliptial orbit). Another advantage is it would require less delta-v to get to the moon.