Jim the shuttles slows down from about 18,000 miles an hour to around 15,000 before it hits the atmosphere and it burns off most of the speed on the way down. I don't think there is any way to get the needed fuel up in to space.
The fact that these things blow up on a regular basis keeps us from putting too much fuel on them or using nuclear power.
What I think is funny os that the onboard computers still have 64k RAM
