starship-design: X-33 Forces Lose Battle, Space Plane Scuttled

X-33 Forces Lose Battle, Space Plane Scuttled

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 09:47 am ET
12 December 2001

WASHINGTON -- Advocates for keeping the NASA-Lockheed Martin X-33 space plane in one piece have lost the battle, with the experimental craft now being dismantled.

Last week, Lockheed Martin and NASA sources suggested an agreement was forthcoming to possibly place the X-33 in storage at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The craft would become a true "hangar queen" - kept inside a specially built desert facility. The storage site was part of the launch complex from which the vehicle was to have been launched on a series of suborbital test shots.

However, this saving grace of a plan was shelved.

On Monday, workers in Palmdale, California -- where the X-33 sits -- began the task of taking apart the flight-ready hardware.

Now the high-tech leftovers of the X-33 will be divvied up between NASA and contractors to help cultivate work on next-generation space transportation concepts.

Worthwhile hardware

Much of the X-33 rocket plane structure was completed. Also, a set of linear aerospike engines that would push the craft skyward had been test fired.

Over $1.2 billion in NASA and industry cash was poured into the project since July 1996. Funds came largely from the government, with the space agency providing 70 percent of the monies, with industry providing the other 30 percent.

Earlier this year, NASA nixed the cooperative effort, allowing the partnership to expire in March of this year. At one point, the U.S. Air Force studied whether or not to back the X-33, later deciding against the idea.

For NASA, the work was to lead to a space shuttle replacement. For Lockheed Martin, the sub-scale X-33 was seen as critical to verifying new technologies in the building of a company dream machine, the larger VentureStar, a commercial, fully reusable, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.

Action plan list

"There's a lot of worthwhile hardware," said Dennis Smith, program manager for NASA's Space Launch Initiative (SLI) at the space agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Since both NASA and industry partners spent money on X-33, how best to dispose of space plane elements is now under discussion, he said.

Among items being eyed for distribution: X-33 oxygen tanks, umbilical cords, fiber optic cabling, avionics gear, propellant feed lines, electro-mechanical actuators, valves, advanced thermal protection system tiles, and special software.

"There's just an enormous amount of hardware that we can transition over to SLI, or other programs. The hardware has a lot of utility in it," Smith told SPACE.com. "It became obvious, to us at least, that the hardware was worth more distributed than it was together," he said.

Smith said an action plan list of what and where X-33 parts are to be shipped and stored is in the works, due before the end of the month.

A lot of the hardware could likely end up at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, California, Smith said, as well as at Marshall Space Flight Center or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Lockheed Martin's use of X-33 bits and pieces hasn't been pinpointed, Smith said. "Anything that the government owns will be open to anyone, and we'll make that list available," he said.

The X-33's desert launch site at Edwards Air Force Base has been transferred over to the military, Smith said.

Intellectual property

Julie Andrews, Lockheed Martin spokeswoman, said company engineers were always hopeful of saving the vehicle.

One company source said the decision produced a lot of long faces.

"The disappointment of never seeing X-33 fly is one thing. But we're optimistic about the next step," Andrews said. "There was an understanding it was at an end...and then onto the next generation," she said.

Andrews said that divvying up the hardware assets is still being assessed. A detailed plan is still coming on specific items and where they are going to go, she said.

"But the intellectual property is probably the strongest thing people have taken away from the project," Andrews said.