Nick Hoffman said:

"All the best "Flash Gordon" rockets have big fins that everyone today says are anachronistic errors in putting aerodynamic surfaces on spacecraft."

Those silly Flash Gordon rocket ships were essentially vertical take off and landing RLVs (they were patterned after the German V-2 rockets). Yes, it is true that having aerodynamic surfaces in space makes no sense assuming the spacecraft is always out of the atmosphere. Of course, the Space Shuttle has big wings on it because it's an atmospheric vehicle that is also an orbiter. A co-worker of mine who has been trying to figure out how to design a second generation shuttle tells me that none of the proposed winged based RLV designs work due to poor structure/propellant mass fraction. The bottom line is that wings are heavy! Mother nature seems to be telling us to forget about wings and instead design RLVs using vertical take off and landing, e.g. Delta-X. A Delta-X derivative was proposed for X-33 but rejected. Maybe that's where we should be going?

Gary