Of course a refueled-in-orbit Space Shuttle can get to Lunar Orbit. That was described in an Analog article. It was then pitched to Rockwell Space Division management by a plagiarist claiming the idea as his own. Rockwell demurred, just as they did when VP Dan Quayle asked if they had anything on the drawing board like "beam me up on Star Trek." I pushed them to do an "unsolicited" white paper on teleportation, and get some quick bucks, but management was afraid the story would get out, as their "engine that never needed to be refueled" had done when pitched to Idaho National Energy Labs.

Rockwell hoped to make the big time with the cargo-only Shuttle-C I worked on that proposal), and various Manned Orbiting Vehicles and the like. They had an entire Lunar-Planetary program (to which I was assigned half-time) which dead-ended when another proven plagiarist drove out all the MIT and Caltech graduates who kept pointing out his errors (such as cubical inflatable Moonbase buildings).

The true absurdity of how the US Space program shot its feet out from under itself is too tragicomic for this blog, and I hope to novelize it someday...