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Personally, I put the beginning of this program with the NASA Lifting body program[1]. The most famous one for me being the M2-F2 which was shown crashing in th

• smacktoward 7y ago
  Those who played the classic computer game Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space (which was completely open-sourced a few years ago: see https://www.raceintospace.org/ https://www.raceintospace.org/) will remember that one of the key decisions in that game, which was all about building a space program that could get you to the moon, was whether to use traditional capsules (Gemini/Apollo on the US side, Voskhod/Soyuz for the USSR) in the mid-to-late game, or to go with reusable lifting body-type vehicles instead. The American player could build the "XMS-2", a fictional vehicle derived from the X-20 Dyna-Soar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar), and the Soviet player could build a similarly fictional vehicle based on the MiG-105 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105). It was a big decision gameplay-wise, as capsules were much cheaper to research and purchase, but the reusability of mini-shuttles meant you didn't have to buy a whole new crew vehicle for each shot. So if you could scrounge up the money to buy a few in the mid-game, you could free up big bucks in the late game that would otherwise have gone towards buying all those capsules.