Closer to reality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar

I am still pissed we didn't just iron out the issues with this and go down this tech tree / alt hist route.

The cited main problem that lead to cancellation was difficulty in making carbon fiber fuel tanks in a non standard shape.

Pretty sure we have the tech to pull that off now... or just, make it out of a better, more well understood and proven material/design, as literally every engineer on the project was screaming at management to do...

...as best I can tell, everything else about the demonstrater worked.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2006/01/x-33venturestar-what-really-happened/

Basically, despite every involved engineer saying: "this new idea for hydrogen tanks based on a composite honeycomb wrapped in carbon fiber is stupid, we already made weird lobe shaped LOX tanks out of a lithium-aluminum alloy, they work, just make the hydrogen tanks out of them too'.

And then NASA Director Ivan Bekey said, to Congress: "we really need to actually focus on this composite wrap fuel tank design because of uh, technical reasons, and also, it will be harder to attract private funding if we uh... use aluminum tanks that are reliably proven to work... because... uh , uh, uh, wacky composite carbon fiber tanks are necessary, fuck you."

This explanation makes no fucking sense beyond Bekey being incompetent or paid off by someone to intentionally doom the project.

The engineers literally built and tested the hydrogen fuel tanks/mated lobes made out of the aluminum lithium alloy... and it was fucking lighter than the composite honeycomb one that failed, when the whole fucking main idea of using composites was that they would reduce weight.

The linear spike rockets fucking worked. Quite well actually.

But uh nope, instead, all that tech just got mothballed, and now 20 years later we get to watch Elon waste 10s of billions of dollars creating meteor showers with a fundamentally unworkable design.

Its infuriating, and today, almost no one knows this ever even happened, that we've been sitting on the ability to do this for 20 years, for no explainable reason.

...

To summarize and repeat:

We know how to make an actually, fully reusable SSTO craft, that can lift more weight to LEO than the partially reusable Falcon 9 can.

The Falcon 9 can only exceed VentureStar's LEO capacity when it is fully expended, no recovery, no re-use.

We have known how to do this for 20 years.

We just choose not to for nonsense bureaucracy reasons.