I had to read the comment below (from u/modeless) before I realized by landing gear you meant the upright ones. I thought you wanted it to land sideways like a plane. (Arguably doable, though the control systems might add a lot more weight)

The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.

To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.

We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.

Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.

It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…