[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Bill

Greenguy is right, as usual. The shuttle basically 'falls' back to earth, and since it has to be moving faster than 18,000 miles per hours just to be in orbit, it has to dump a ton of speed to be able to land on the earths surface at a few hundred miles per hour. It does that by rubbing against the atmosphere, which heats it up.

UW, I'm surprizef to hear you say such things, I would figure you would know that the tech spinoffs from space exploration have been probably the single largest driver of the US tech economy for the past 40 years. Everything technical we use, from computers in cars, to our computers, to the instruments in our hospitals, to cell phones, almost everything technical that affects our lifestyle and makes us so rich can be traced back to research done for space exploration.

So, that money IS being spent here on earth, only leveraged out a hundredfold to a thoudsandfold.

Ditto

Originally Posted by Maj. Stress

Burt Rutan figured it out. I couldn't find the article that shows exactly how he did it but this article has some info on his spaceship that won the prize for the first privately funded vehicle to go into space.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077811/

I believe this is because it is actually sub-obital so it is not going so fast.