.....NASA, Lockheed Martin Agree On X-33 Plan !

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
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"jonathan" wrote in message
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"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
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"jonathan" wrote in message
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Just one month before Bush wins the White House~


Atlanta Inquirer
10-14-2000
NASA, Lockheed Martin Agree On X-33 Plan

NASA and Lockheed Martin have agreed on a plan to go forward with the X-33
space plane program, to include aluminum fuel tanks for the vehicle's
hydrogen fuel, a revised payment schedule and a target launch date in 2003.
The launch date is a contingent on Lockheed Martin's ability to compete and
win additional funding under the Space Launch Initiative. NASA and Lockheed
believe it is critical to continue work to solve the last remaining barrier
to low-cost, reliable access to space.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-79131028.html


I see no malice by the administration here, only incompetence in picking the
most technologically challenging X-33 proposal and actually expecting it to
lead to a mature flight prototype.

Not malice, militarization.

I call b.s. As far as I'm concerned, there is no credible evidence that the
US military had any interest in terminating X-33. If anything, if X-33 had
flown, they would have gotten some good data from it, just as NASA would have.

The fact is that the US military is not that interested in pushing reusability
of launch vehicles. Witness the fact that we already have to underutilized
EELV's, developed to meet US military requirements for launching military
payloads. They're currently moderately interested in reusable upper
stages/satellites, which could be launched by existing launch vehicles. But I
absolutely don't see them pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing
them, unlike other emerging military technologies.

Remember, no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. Show me the money.


You mean the Pentagon black budget?
The whole point of this thread is to figure out what happened to
/decades of effort/ to build reusable or SSO vehicles. Has it
actually been abandoned, or merely moved to the Pentagon?

The evidence is pretty clear it's been moved to the Pentagon.

For starters, the AFSPC plan I posted essentially says
to take the technology of the two scale demonstrators and use
them in the next step, a full scale military space plane. And
the plan was clear they thought the X-37 was the better of the
two. And here we see the X-37b is about to launch. So it's
rather logical to assume that 'plan' is proceeding just as
it's written.

Else why bother with the X-37b???

So I conclude this country is still trying to build the next
generation of space plane. Something that will help
fullfill the long sought promise of low cost to orbit.

But post 9/11, it's also clear such a capability is a the
next military high ground. Just as the first jet, the sound
barrier and the fastest have always been military secrets.
A space plane should be a highly guarded secret also.

And having the Pentagon and NASA continue to
share a black budget project to completion doesn't
really make any sense.

If the US military really is *very* interested in these sorts of
technologies, why don't we see them spending the money to make them a reality?
The answer is they're interested, but not *that* interested.


How can we know how much the Pentagon is spending, or at
what level their latest technology has achieved? If it's a military
capability, we're not going to get any real details.




Jeff
--
"Many things that were acceptable in 1958 are no longer acceptable today. My
own standards have changed too." -- Freeman Dyson