Doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. First, unless the satellite / bomb dispenser happens to be in the right orbit at the right time, you'd have to do s

Doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. First, unless the satellite / bomb dispenser happens to be in the right orbit at the right time, you'd have to do some significant maneuvering on orbit. This is expensive in terms of energy/fuel. By the time you put the dispenser over or on the correct path to target, it might not even be faster than a conventional endo- or exo-atmospheric ballistic missile (SRBM/IRBM or ICBM). Second, long range nuclear strike is one of the USAF's justifications for its silo missile and bomber fleet, particularly the B-2 and just-started-production B-21 Raider (LRS-B). They're going to have some awkward questions to answer if a big part of their signature stealth penetration bomber's mission could have been done by another system all along. Hell, the USAF has been desperately trying to come up with non-nuclear roles for their existing nuclear delivery systems ("Prompt Global Strike", aka "hitting someone in the head with a reentry vehicle full of concrete going 7000 m/s") for years. Third, it's overly complex for that role. An ICBM warhead dispenser is something that exists; it's called the "bus" on MIRV missiles. If you wanted to put a bomb dispenser in orbit, you don't need a cool spaceplane. You just put a slightly bigger engine (or an extra stage) onto a traditional MIRV bus, so it has the delta-V to get into a stable LEO and sit there until you use or de-orbit it. The Soviets played with this concept extensively during the 1980s, and their "Sarmat" superheavy ICBM is probably capable of it. This was considered pretty destabilizing at the time (since it would avoid north-facing early warning systems) and was banned by treaty. So the US would be opening a can of worms back up that it seemingly tried hard to close in the 1980s, and it's a weirdly complicated way of doing it, vs. just building a superheavy ICBM like Russia did. A lot of the complexity of a Shuttle / delta-plane design is related to getting back from orbit. A weapons dispenser, whether nuclear or kinetic ("tungsten rods from God") wouldn't need to be recoverable at all. Or if you really insist on that as a requirement, it could use a cheap-and-cheerful Apollo-style splashdown design. Why have it land like a plane? Nuclear weapons are pretty robust. You could splash one into the ocean going pretty fast and still have it be recoverable. Which leads me to my personal theory: the design only makes sense if the intent is to bring things back. Fragile things. The NASA Shuttle landed like it did, because it had fragile humans on board. But why would a remotely-piloted vehicle need to? Maybe if it's bringing back things from orbit that were never meant to land on Earth in one piece.