Why are space shuttles always rockets, and take off straight upward?

Yeah I never said they escape the gravity well, only that they need to get further out to even start orbiting and it's pretty strong even during the first 2000km out.

I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of the rocket equation when I was 13.
I was much too busy playing with my own rocket.

My mom said it's because space agencies are dominated by men and they want to show off their big phallus symbols.

KSP laughs at your underestimation of just how far nerds will push space simulators.

The question doesn't really make sense to me to begin with... Space shuttles aren't rockets. They were very specific types of vehicles that were launched into space using rockets and were designed to come back. They looked like school buses with wings and landed on the ground like airplanes unlike those pods you see from lunar landers and such.

Very simple: It would not ease the problem. Rockets explode violently because they have to carry both the fuel and the oxydizer, and this is a dangerous mix. Things will blow up at the smallest error, and errors are made because it is still cutting edge research.

I forget the guys name,

Werner von Braun. He wasn't a nazi, but he worked for them because execution by firing squad is a sucky way to go.

why not design a space craft, which more resembles the take-off of an airplane?

Scientists and engineers are working on exactly that, but the tech isn't ready yet. There would still need to be a rocket stage, but getting to the top of the atmosphere would be safer.

I mean they've tried and recently, but there are actually a lot of additional problems that kick in as soon as you try it e.g. you can't just use the air for fuel for oxidiser once you are going at the sorts of speeds you need to achieve.

Skylon (spacecraft) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft

There's actually lots of air in space. The ISS is still in the atmosphere technically. It's just less dense by many factors of 10.

True, but acknowledging the truth of the matter makes making references more challenging.

As a point of fact, the winner of the X Prize wasn’t actually SpaceX… it was Scaled Composites with their jet-launched rocket-powered space plane.

The problem is that nobody really needs to go to space… there isn’t much money in it… On the other hand, people will pay millions to get the ORBIT. Going to space is just a matter of getting high enough, but orbit is all about getting fast as hell. In most cases, as far as we have learned, that means getting out of the atmosphere by the shortest means possible. The savings from launching higher from a jet don’t tend to offset the dramatically reduced payload and increased complexity.

Werner vom Braun famously said his rocket performed beautifully, it just landed on the wrong planet. So it was designed to go where no human had gone before, not to explode.

Getting out of the atmosphere is the most costly part of space travel. So you want to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible after launch. The fastest route out of the atmosphere is straight up. It really is that simple.

If you tried to go out it at an angle you would need so much more fuel, which would make the space craft bigger and heavier and more costly to get into space.

Going straight up with a rocket is the most cost efficient way of getting into space.

He was a Nazi. He joined the SS way before the war, and contrary to popular belief Nazis wouldnt execute people for failing to commit atrocities. Anyone who didn't want to assist in atrocities would just be looked over for promotions. He wanted to build rockets, and being a nazi and using slave labor let him do that.