Spaceplane operates as aircraft in Earrh's atmosphere and as spacecraft in space.It is a hybrid of a plane and a rocket capable of atmospheric flight with wings and spaceflight with reaction engines.

Space shuttle is a lifting body needing additional rocket engines for thrust. It is a low Earth ORBITAL spacecraft.

The engines are the main difference.

Interesting reading is NASA's educational site.

The aerodynamic heating in spaceplane could be lower as it is designed as orbital and  sub-orbitals planes  but  space shuttle thermal protection system protects aerodynamic heating on space shuttle because on re-entry surface temperature reaches more than 1600 C on higher free stream velocity in space shuttle .

The difference between these two would be variation of temperature on re-entry due to their design types caused due to additional engines in case of space shuttle and lesser engines in spaceplane.

The Space Shuttle is no plane, even though it has wings. The wings however provide very little lift - its balistic coefficient is approx. 1. the lift is used to ease reentry and make spacecraft steerable (no engine operation during landing). However it basically is a spacecraft and not designed for prolonged operation in the atmosphere.

An aircraft flies inside the earth atmosphere. In order to fly within the atmosphere, the aircraft have wings, tail and so on. An aircraft normally utilize air breathing engines which means that the engines use air from the atmosphere like jet engines and piston engines etc.

 A space vehicle typically has an intention to fly to the outer atmosphere or to operate outside the earth's atmosphere or space. Almost all space launch vehicles use rockets or boosters which carry with them there supply of oxygen as there are little or no atmosphere above 100 km of the surface of the earth. Also in space there is no oxygen, so a space launch vehicle usually carries with itself both fuel and oxidizer and are normally rockets or boosters. An example of space vehicle is a space shuttle which has both the abilities to fly to space and can glide inside the earth atmosphere. Other space vehicles are mainly designed to operate in space e.g space station and so on. A booster rocket is most popular form of propulsion of space vehicle when it comes to using solid fuel as rocket propellant while liquid oxygen and hydrogen are increasingly used in rockets in the part of liquid fueled rocket engines.

Aerospace plane is operated at lower altitude than the space shuttle; the aerodynamic heating is lower in plane than the shuttle (ablation heating).

Propelling power is combination of air breathing and rocketry type of system in space plane, but in shuttle only rocketry type of propelling.

Dear Ashwani,

An aerospaceplane is an aircraft which can reach orbit. It operates as an aircraft within the atmosphere and as a launcher(rocket)-orbiter combination outside the atmosphere. It takes-off and flies within the atmosphere like an aircraft, using air-breathing engines. At some point in its flight it switches to rocket engines and goes into orbit like a launcher(rocket)-orbiter combination. On the return journey from orbit it operates like an orbiter until entering the atmosphere. Then, it flies again and lands like an aircraft.

The Space Shuttle is the orbiter of a launcher(rocket)-orbiter combination. It reaches orbit by means of the launcher(rocket). On the return journey from orbit when entering the atmosphere it operates almost like an aircraft.

Best wishes,

N. Kehayas