– could the space shuttle just fly into space like a plane, rather than being propelled vertically by rockets?
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However well-designed your aircraft is, flying will only get you so high, because you need air to give you lift. As the air gets thinner, you run out of lift.
Plus – there’s a trade-off. While there’s air around you to push you up, there’s also air in front of you that you need to push out of the way. And that slows you down. So even if you COULD hit orbital velocity for the height in question, you’d drop back below it very fast if you were to cut your engine. So, basically, no. Eventually you hit a point where the only way to get higher – beyond the noticable atmoshpere – is basically brute force. With current technology, that effectively means rockets.
In principle, IF you could manage to get your aircraft, with an air-breathing engine, screaming horizontally through the atmosphere fast enough, you could just nose-up your ‘plane and let its raw momentum take you up to an orbital height. Unfortunately, “fast enough” is, apparently, about 30 times the speed that anything is capable of today. So, again, no.
As for the actual space shuttle – it was once described as a “flying brick”. It was optimised for a controlled re-entry, not sustained, level atmospheric flight.
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