jeff findley wrote:

If your only metric is innovation. Unfortunately, when you have a
fixed budget (which X-33 essentially had), there is an inverse
relationship between innovation and successfully completing a flight
test program. In other words, the entire program was shut down before
all of the bugs could be worked out in the innovative areas.


The Skunk Works broke one of its own rules on that project- one _and
only one_ new breakthrough technology per project. They tried a linear
plug nozzle motor, lightweight metallic TPS, and composite LH2 tanks all
at once- that was just begging for failure.



When NASA (or any other government agency) wants a specific company or
specific proposal to win the competitive bid process, it writes the
RFP to be sure that happens. It doesn't specify "innovative" for a
warmed-over SDIO concept or an Orbiter retread.



Innovative gets specified when there is more of a desire to play in a
technological sandbox than there is to do real work towards lowering
the costs of access to space.

In the end, NASA's official position is that X-33 failed because we do
not yet have the technology to produce a workable SSTO.


Remember the Lockheed CL-400 Suntan though- it also was a complete flop,
but taught a lot of lessons on how _not_ to do things that paid off in
the A-12/SR-71 projects.


In the end,
this program did more harm than good, especially when NASA refuses to
admit any guilt as it relates to the program's failure.


I think NASA got sold a line of bull by Lockheed Martin, especially when
Lockheed implied that a lot of the technology that they would be using
was based on something classified that they did...and which they
couldn't talk about (wink, wink).
Whatever it was, it apparently didn't use composite LH2 tanks, did it?

Pat