On Monday, August 19, 2013 7:25:16 AM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:

It's also worth noting that between the DC-X flight and today, NASA
spent some time, and quite a lot of money, building, but never actually
flying, the X-vehicle intended to prove reusable launch vehicle
technologies: X-33.

....This isn't that surprising, to be honest. Something that's been bounced around over the years since the only space history presence on Usenet was sci.columbia was the fact that before and after the "Glory Days" there was, and still is, a heavy influence upon NASA to follow the "Langley Approach". In other words, Langley's talented group going back to the origins of the N.A.C.A. came up with ideas/discoveries/designs, published papers on them, and then let others come along and actually *do* something with the info. "That's not the way we do things at Langley" was a credo/dogma that, had it not been shelved by the double-whammy of Sputnik and Gagarin, would have arguably kept the US out of the crash programs that participation in the Space Race called for, if not to mention closing the "Missile Gap" regardless of whether it was for real or fueled by mutual suspicion/distrust. Once that flag was on the Moon, however, the "Langley Approach" clearly began to hold more sway than "Go Fever" had for the previous decade.

[sigh] Once upon a time, this thread would have brought on all sorts of debates/flamewars, only to be eventually corrected into silence by Henry...

OM