02 March 2001 Philadelphia Inquirer
NASA pulls the plug on space plane
By Seth Borenstein
INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU
The announcement on the X-33, which was supposed to replace the aging shuttle fleet, came a day after NASA said it would dramatically prune plans to expand the International Space Station because the program is $4 billion over budget.
"It's 52-card-pickup time," space analyst John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington policy group, said of the NASA human spaceflight program. "It's in greater disarray than it's been in some decades."
The X-33 program, over budget and behind schedule, needed money from NASA to stay alive. Yesterday, NASA said it would spend no more on the plane, which was being built by Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md. NASA also canceled an experimental unmanned-rocket program called X-34.
Without NASA money, "I can't see us pressing forward alone," Lockheed Martin spokesman Evan McCollum said yesterday.
Art Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which oversaw the program, said NASA learned from the space plane and the X-34 "that our technology has not yet advanced to the point that we can successfully develop a new reusable-launch vehicle that substantially improves safety, reliability and affordability."
That leaves NASA's fleet of space shuttles, the oldest of which turns 20 next month, flying people to and from orbit for now, said John Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University. But that's not a problem, he said: "There are a lot of airplanes that fly a lot more years than 20."
A NASA advisory safety panel, however, said last month that if the shuttle was not replaced soon, the space agency should make major improvements to the fleet.
The X-33 was to have lightweight composite metal fuel tanks and linear engines unlike anything that had flown into space before. It was to be 10 times cheaper than the shuttle and would have the ability to fly back into space within about a week of landing, instead of the months it can take to turn around shuttles.
The X-33 prototype ran into problems from the start. The initial test flight, scheduled for 1999, has been delayed repeatedly. During testing in November 1999, the skin of its two high-tech fuel tanks started coming apart. Lockheed Martin switched to aluminum fuel tanks.
"The technology is just not there yet," McCollum said.
Seth Borenstein's e-mail address is sborenstein@krwashington.com.
© 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
