Von Braun dreamt of winged spacecrafts....
That's what connected aeronautics to astronautics and influenced generations of space enthusiasts.
The Dyna Soar was planned....
When, suddenly....the spherical wingless Vostok beat the US.....
Then came the US capsules, taking americans to the Moon and keeping them for 84 straight days in space....
But, no, that didn't look like progress, and then came the winged space shuttle....which never reduced costs of sending humans to space...and it killed twice in 124 flights...
The wingless Soyuz keeps working even of the ride is unconfortable ; no private company has managed to send humans to orbit in winged spacecrafts. The shuttle successor is a capsule, not a winged spacecraft.
Wings (and landing gears) become an obvious dead weight for spacecrafts meant for long distances and long duration flights.
But what about tourists who would want only to have a great view in short low polar orbit flights? (That, according to astronauts, would be the best space experience). What kind of spacecraft could be cheap enough to invest in for the tourism industry? Winged or capsule like?
Winged spacecrafts? Ever a good idea?
