How to fly a spaceplane

[MitchS]

My SSTOs sucked until I started adding more wing area than I thought I needed, and rotated all the wings one fine notch in the SPH to add a few degrees of incidence.

My rule of thumb for achieving adequate wing area it now is that stall speed over the runway should be about 55m/s. This way, since SSTOs let wings do the work that engines do for rockets, you get the wings to do a lot of the work, and it saves fuel for interplanetary sightseeing or payload capacity. Works for me, might for you.