Reddit reviews Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013
We found 1 Reddit comments about Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
A lot was studied for Shuttle (Developing an Icon dedicates a long chapter to it), but AFAIK transpiration cooling wasn't seriously considered.
Lockheed even warned NASA about the problems of ceramic heat tiles, but they couldn't come up with any better proposal quickly enough (read: over a 15 years period), and in the end there was no ready, usable alternative.
To my understanding, transpiration cooling shares some of same (dis-)advantages as regular epoxy heat shields: You get a hot expanding gas zone of varying thickness from the evaporating coolant liquid/epoxy, which is great – unless you're sitting in an airplane that needs the lift of its wings to maintain its course and attitude, and not flip over and crash.
BFS/ITS doesn't care, since it's not a space plane and doesn't need any lift, but for the manned space projects of the time it would've been useless – X-15, X-20, HL series, X-23, X-24, and all the other projects that culminated in Shuttle needed to be planes to fit Air Force requirements, and for Mercury/Gemini/Apollo it offered no improvement over epoxy shields.