X37C needed

The U.S. Air Force's Boeing X-37B, which began as a NASA craft but was transferred to the Pentagon in 2004, is an unmanned space plane that looks like a small space shuttle. Like the shuttle, it returns to Earth and lands on a runway. It has been flying successfully for five years. A scaled-up version with an astronaut crew to work outside the vehicle could reestablish America's ability to build and maintain big structures in Earth orbit.

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Shuttle

I think that was a mistake. Space Shuttle was and remains the most capable flying machine ever conceived, built and operated. We learned much from the thirty years of Shuttle flights, and in my opinion, we should still be flying them. Shuttle carried a crew of seven, plus nearly sixty thousand pounds of payload to low earth orbit. After transforming from a rocket into an orbital research or construction platform, it entered the atmosphere and landed on a conventional runway at the end of its mission. After around one hundred days of processing, it was ready to fly again.
Leroy Chiao