– could the space shuttle just fly into space like a plane, rather than being propelled vertically by rockets?
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The Orbiter (the part of the Space Shuttle that looks sort of like a plane) had it’s own main rocket engines (three of them), but those were not powerful enough on their own to get to orbit, which is why the SS also had the pair of solid rocket boosters at launch. Also even if the shuttle had big enough engines for an orbital launch, it wouldn’t have anywhere near enough capacity to carry the fuel required to get there. That’s why it had the big orange external tank.
Like other replies have said, once you get too high up, there’s not enough oxygen in the atmosphere to power a jet engine, so you have to use rockets. And one of the unfortunate things about rockets is that they need a lot of fuel. Fuel is heavy and bulky, and requires a lot of ‘extra’ volume and weight for your launch vehicle in order to carry the fuel until it’s used. This is why spacecraft pretty much always launch with some sort of rocket assembly that they then separate from before they reach their final altitude. It just doesn’t make sense to bring all of those fuel tanks all the way up with you, it’s too big and heavy and is not useful to the spacecraft once that fuel has been spent.
Another potential solution is to use an larger airplane to get the spacecraft as high up as you can, and then have it separate from the aircraft before using its own rockets to go the rest of the way, but as far as I’m aware none of those built so far have been powerful enough to achieve orbit.
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