A page with some good photos showing the Enterprise on an ET with SRBs stacked up at the Slick Six western launch site:

1985: Space Shutle at Vandenberg

Whether it would’ve made good sense to fly the Shuttle from California can be debated… but undeniable, I think, is the view that it would have been a damn fine show.

Had Challenger not gone FOOM in ’86, the SLC-6 site *might* have been used for Shuttle launches to high inclination orbits. This, presumably, would ahve opened the door for the Shuttle to be more useful. *Perhaps* it would ahve led to a better system. With launch and recovery processing done by the USAF rather than NASA, *maybe* Vandenberg would have been able to fly Shuttle for much cheaper, more reliably and more often than NASA in Florida. Maybe.