Vince said:

>I doubt NASA will ever put humans anywhere but above
>"rocket" fuel/the top of a rocket. The chances of debris
>falling is too great.

The real error was not so much having the orbit vehicle mounted sideways but using a delicate thermal protection system (TPS). They opted for the foam because it was cheap. By doing so they significantly added to the orbit vehicle's risk of failure. That decision might have been calculated, e.g. A 10% increase in risk on a $1 billion orbit vehicle is justifiable if the savings are greater $100 million. Engineers are always doing that sort of cost / risk trade off with design. IMHO, delicate TPS on reusable vehicles is just poor design. One must always baby a vehicle with a delicate TPS, e.g. worry about hail storns, having tiles pop off, etc. The Shuttle should have been designed to be fully reusable with a titanium shingle TPS. Titanium shingles were proposed for the failed X-33. If X-33 had been designed as a biamese TSTO rather than a SSTO, then it probably would have been successful. As it stands, we're screwed with the Space Shuttle and probably making a bad decision by going back to capsules. However we got not choice. The Shuttle is timing out and it would take too long to come up with a viable RLV replacement. CEV is our only option short of terminating manned Space Exploration altogether.

Gary