X-33 Men

...Reusability means not dumping as much engineering handiwork into the ocean with each launch, and it’s a good way of getting astronauts back to a convenient location instead of dumping them in the middle of the Indian Ocean...

...Boeing would then obtain financial commitments from these companies to buy the new aircraft, which would then allow it to borrow the money needed to take the project into full production...

...The shuttle requires an army of inspectors looking at each part as it comes off the assembly line to make sure it is properly made...

...Maybe we shouldn’t put fins on spaceships [either...

...Their little plastic model was something called the shuttle, which was going to bring down launch costs, make space travel routine, and . . . well, you get the picture...

...Companies in countries ranging from the United States to china compete for the business of launching satellites, giving satellite companies plenty to choose from and little reason to spend any more than they have to...

...You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of this moment,” Gore said...

...There simply is not enough money to pay out $6 billion a year for the shuttle and space station and also develop a shuttle replacement...

...To do so it will invest $46 billion, which will be more than recovered with launch business from NASA and other public and private organizations...

...Lockheed Martin’s flying wedge design beat out a proposal by McDonnell Douglas that looked like a winged bowling pin, and one by Rockwell that looked an awful lot like @erhaps no surprise here) the shuttle...

...Now acting chairman of the history department at Duke University, he was NASA’s in-house historian when the shuttle was being developed...

...There is little reason to believe a private company would want to put $4-6 billion at risk for the X33’s follow-on (if indeed it can be built for that, which many experts believe is a fallacy...

...X-33 Men Gore and Goldin's new space shuttle is a bad idea whose time has come BY DAN CARNEY IT WOULD BE HARD TO IMAGINE A MEDIA opportunity better suited to Vice President Al Gore and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin than their recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California...

...Ever since, NASA has been taking annual funding cuts of 5 to 10 percent, leaving NASA in a predicament...

...Among them is the space station, which was first proposed in 1952 and is ping forward today for reasons that aren’t entirely clear...

...But the huge difference between the kind of rockets that launch people and the kind that launch payloads can only be bridged with a major engineering revolution...

...But it also means hoisting much more dead weight into space only to bring it back again...

...The declining level of interest has certainly been apparent on Capitol Hill...

...You know, in the ’50s we built all these cars that looked like airplanes...

...In contrast, people rockets are not cheap...

...If the follow-on to the X33 were an airplane to be built by Boeing, the project would be fairly straightforward...

...The shuttle gave up on the commercial market after the 1986 Challenger disaster...

...This worries a lot of people...

...So the agency has come up with the X33 concept, a program that sounds too good to be true and almost certainly is...

...goes along with history repeating itself...

...scientists scoff at the notion that it’s worth anywhere near its cost as a microgravity research station...

...Both were conceived to launch astronauts and satellites and to serve both government and commercial needs...

...He has devised a program of tiny planetary probes with tiny budgets and great expectations...

...The Challenger tragedy exposed another problem with trying to devise something that is both a people rocket and a payload rocket...

...When the question is how they will be built and whether they will meet their stated objectives, the skepticism turns to outright incredulity...

...For less than $1 billion, the United States would not only get a replacement for the shuttle but would reassert itself as the unquestioned leader in the commercial launch industry...

...Ultimately, the best way to understand the significance of the moment in Pasadena is through a political lens...

...ELVs are currently being launched at the rate of more than one a week, serving a burgeoning satellite industry racing to maintain and expand its role in global telecommunications...

...But NASA is trapped in time and dominated by ponderous and expensive programs that neither Gore nor Goldin likes much, but that they feel compelled to support...

...Thanks to $220 million from Lockheed Martin and $941 million from the taxpayers, the X33 would evolve into a completely privately financed launch vehicle that would slash the cost of getting to space by a factor of 10, replace NASA’s aging shuttle fleet, and create whole new space industries capitalizing on these new bargainbasement rates for ascending into the heavens...

...That’s why it’s so surprising that reinventers like Gore and Goldin would choose a brand new project that looks so much like the agency’s most recent failure...

...It could end up like the shuttle, a technological ward of the state, whose true costs do not become evident until after NASA can make the case that it has already reached the point of no return...

...And then there’s the space shuttle, which has few defenders even within NASA...

...The X33 is one of a long line of aerospace projects of particular interest to California (and its 54 electoral votes) that seem to materialize during even-numbered years divisible by four...

...In this case, Lockheed Martin can pretty much write off the commercial satellite industry...

...The shuttle came along in 1972...

...It has instead become a colossally expensive failure...

...The space station program was launched by President Reagan in 1984...

...As Gore and Goldin spoke of the X33, there was a sense of a new beginning in the air...

...Since Goldin joined NASA in 1992, he has shed 3,900 jobs with no loss in output...

...The classic cylinder with a cone on top, .they ascend vertically and drop sections as soon as they have expended their fuel...

...There are pluses to the reusable approach...

...This is certainly a creative way of financing a government project with government money, but it’s still your tax dollars at work,” says Pike...

...The Apollo program was cut short by two flights due to dwindling public interest...

...That leaves one major customer: the government...

...Twenty-four years earlier, President Nixon and his NASA administrator James Fletcher had convened in an almost identical ceremony a few miles south in San Clemente...

...A factor of two or more would be lovely, believe me,” says Jerry Grey of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a trade group that supports spending on space projects...

...Shortly after Lockheed Martin won the X33 contract, it announced it would need government financial backing over and above the $941 million for the X33 prototype...

...Ultimately, we decided airplanes and cars didn’t have a whole lot in common...

...The most striking similarity is that neither the shuttle in 1972 nor the X33 in 1996 knows what it is supposed to be...

...Like many NASA projects, this one is embellished with underestimates of costs and overstatements of uses...

...Whether NASA can do all of this with its next rocket and still have something that is competitive for payloads is highly doubtful...

...Payload rockets first and foremost are cheap...

...He has torn apart fiefdoms and simplified chains of command-doing things like eliminating three of the four “prime contractors” designing NASA’s $30 billion space station...

...The commercial launch industry has figured out that the most efficient way to get satellites into space is not with perfect rockets, but with reasonably good ones that sometimes miss the mark...

...The X33, like the shuttle, will look nothing like an 2 ELV NASA has an obsession with reusable rockets that take off vertically, land horizontally and look like overweight airplanes...

...The scene in Pasadena had the kind of eerie familiarity that often DAN CARNEY, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, covered NASA for four years for the Houston Post...

...With its development, the replacement of the Challenger, and other up-front costs factored in, a former House Science Committee staffer estimated its cost at $1.8 billion per launch, 20 times the original projection...

...When a people rocket blows up, it’s more than an underwriter’s headache-it’s a national tragedy...

...Promised in 1972 at a cost of $88 million per launch, it is now running about $500 million just in annual operating expenses...

...Completing the picture was Norman Augustine, vice chairman of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and the prime contractor for the Gore-Goldin masterstroke, the X33, the new space vehicle that would be the vanguard of NASA’s reinvention...

...But I couldn’t believe he would stand up and say the things he did...

...There is certainly plenty of business from Uncle Sam, particularly if Pentagon launches are added to the mix...

...The most obvious difference between today’s payload and people rockets is that they do not look at all alike...

...Or it could end up like the National Aerospace Plane, the National Launch System, and myriad other projects that were funded for a few years but never were taken into full production...

...The X33 and its successor won’t even be designed to go to the higher orbits where most telecommunications satellites reside...

...Since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, interest in the human space program has been declining...

...The most remarkable thing is that these people are saying this with a straight face,” he says...

...The one company that is adept at managing this level of financial riskBoeing-dropped out of the running, saying it couldn’t make the numbers add up...

...And, just in time for another election: the X33...

...According to NASA, the program will unfold as follows: After the completion of the X33 prototype, a company-presumably, though not necessarily, Lockheed Martin-will use the knowledge gained to build a full-scale working rocket...

...Congressional appropriators have always resisted committing future Congresses to spending...

...There are two likely scenarios for the X33 and its successor...

...But asking the federal government to commit ahead of time to a long roster of launches would require rewriting federal procurement laws and could run into antitrust problems...

...The answer goes to the heart of what’s amiss at NASA and why government leaders feel compelled to hold a NASA summit this month...

...There was Gore, the administration’s chief Techno-Democrat and high priest of reinvention, extolling his vision of the future alongside Goldin, the superhero-cum-bureaucrat destined (in his own mind, at least) to reclaim the lost glory of the space program...

...The shuttle program was grounded for two and a half years as the nation mourned, NASA reassessed its program, and the makers of commercial and military satellites that had been counting on the shuttle scrambled for alternatives...

...Realizing that Congress will be in no hurry to appropriate what is sure to be a $10 billionplus son-of-shuttle, NASA has devised a way to get the project under way slowly and surreptitiously...

...They are omnipresent, efficient, and more likely to affect the future of tech- 2 nology than anything in NASA’s arsenal...

...Boeing would identify a need for a jet, then take its ideas to its major airline customers, who would help refine it...

...And for years, shuttle flights have been treated by the news media with about as much interest as a coup in Botswanaa wire story inside the paper or a brief mention on the evening news...

...Nor, unfortunately, do you have to be a rocket scientist to see through this happy charade...

...The payload rockets that launch all commercial satellites and most government ones are Expendable Launch Vehicles, or ELVs...

...Despite these pitfalls, NASA is absolutely convinced that it is right...

...Before and after launch, it undergoes a complete physical...

...In 1993, the House of Representatives came within one vote of terminating the space station...

...Having fought for the shuttle in the 1970s and won, and having fought for the space station in the 1990s and won, it has locked up most of its ever-declining budget...

...And the military has never been fond of dependence on NASA-it learned its lessons after the Challenger disaster, when it had to scramble for ways to get its spy satellites up...

...Safety and reliability and secondary issues...

...Gore and Goldin are no slouches...

...Maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell us something...

...Outside NASA there is a moderate amount of skepticism as to whether the X33 prototype and the permanent vehicle that will follow it (its “follow-on”) should be built...

...When this happens it is not the end of the world...

...Moreover, it means designing a lot of parts from scratch when there are perfectly good ones available from the many expendable rockets in use now...

...For all these headaches, all that is gained is a rocket built for government instead of by government...

...Alex Rolland is one of many people struck by the similarity of the events, the similarity of the proposed rockets, and the similarity of the ends NASA says it will achieve...

...For all these headaches, all that is gained is a rocket built fir government, instead of by government...

...I have great respect for Vice President Gore...

...But the X33 also has something new: a mantle of empowering the private sector and reinventing government, both buzzwords of the 1990s...

...they are safe...

...Its electrical and computer systems are checked and rechecked...

...It employs people who do nothing but dream up potential malfunctions and combinations of malfunctions, and others who devise ways to ensure they will never happen...

...Besides, there are plenty of expendable rockets available...

...Why, then, is America’s space agency pursuing this fantasy...

...Payload rockets routinely fly off into the wrong orbit and occasionally go so far awry they have to be destroyed in-flight...

...There are few experts outside of NASA, however, who believe the project will come anywhere near its stated goals...

...And they are right in wanting to make NASA more like the Pentagon, which contracts out, rather than builds, its major systems...

...and its putative purpose as a staging ground for human trips to the moon and Mars presupposes a taxpayer interest that doesn’t exist...

...Every time we’ve tried to make a spaceship look like an airplane it has turned out to be a flop,” says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists...

...Plenty of people defend the X33 on the grounds that NASA needs something to replace the shuttle...