McDonnell Douglas’ Landable Rocket About to Be Mothballed : Aerospace: Despite successful tests, the Defense Department’s funding for the project is running out.

It was a spectacle right out of Buck Rogers.

A 42-foot-tall, 21-ton, cone-shaped rocket lifted 150 feet above the New Mexico desert, stopped, moved sideways 350 feet, stopped again, then floated back to Earth, landing tail-first on its four pods as smoke and flames poured from its engines .

Never had anyone seen such a vertical landing by a rocket, except in science-fiction movies. And despite lasting only 60 seconds, the maiden voyage last August of the unmanned Delta Clipper-Experimental (DC-X) generated waves of publicity.

But now it appears the DC-X has sputtered out. It is only days from being mothballed by its builder, McDonnell Douglas Corp., for lack of money.

The DC-X exhausted its initial $58-million Defense Department funding in October, after it had made three of 10 planned test flights. Congress had earmarked another $5 million to complete the tests, but it appears the cash won’t be forthcoming from the Pentagon--at least not for now--because of shrinking U.S. defense spending.

Indeed, the Pentagon has already told McDonnell that its contract to continue testing the DC-X at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico will end Tuesday, said Bill Gaubatz, who heads the project for McDonnell.

“It’s their decision,” he said, referring to officials at the Pentagon. “We have no place to go, and we and the whole program essentially have to pick up and move off of White Sands.”

The DC-X is a dramatic illustration of how difficult it is for futuristic technology tied to Pentagon funding to survive budget cuts in the post-Cold War world--even if the technology makes the public sit up and take notice.

The rocket’s uncertain status also reflects the continuing national uncertainty about exactly what kind of space launch vehicles the United States should build in the future. Despite the DC-X’s showy performance, the White House and the Pentagon are evaluating other ways for the United States to modernize its launch capabilities.

Champions of the DC-X believe it would be a cheap, reusable and dependable space launch vehicle that would not need to toss away expensive boosters and other hardware and could be quickly refurbished and launched again.

Hatched by the Pentagon as part of its “Star Wars” defense program, the DC-X is also an ideal prototype for a rocket that could launch commercial payloads for far less money than either the Space Shuttle or existing unmanned rockets, proponents say. In that role, it could bolster the United States’ role in the increasingly crowded space launch business.

The DC-X that has been tested so far is one-third the size of the rocket ultimately envisioned. The final model would be able to lift up to 25,000 pounds of cargo into orbit around the Earth.

Now, Gaubatz said, McDonnell will probably haul the DC-X back to its space division in Huntington Beach, and it has already begun reassigning some employees of the DC-X’s 30-member team.

Seymour Himmel, a space consultant and former NASA engineer, said he hopes the DC-X has a future.

“If we’re going to talk about a national launch vehicle family, then this ought to be considered,” he said.

But, Himmel noted, the DC-X still suffers from confusion about its ultimate role in space--a role that has already changed in a major way since McDonnell began building the craft in 1991.

The rocket was spawned by the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. The agency wanted to develop the DC-X as a way to ferry missile defense shields and weapons into space, and the rocket’s initial financing came through the BMDO.

But with the end of the Cold War, and of most of the Star Wars project, the BMDO is no longer interested in funding the DC-X. So for fiscal 1994, which began Oct. 1, Congress appropriated $5 million for the DC-X’s remaining seven test flights as part of the budget for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But according to Tim Kyger, technology adviser for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), ARPA soon got word from the office of Defense Undersecretary John M. Deutch, who oversees ARPA, not to release the cash to the DC-X.

Rohrabacher is a staunch supporter of the DC-X, and his district includes McDonnell’s Huntington Beach plant.

“There’s a deliberate effort over there (at the Pentagon) to keep this money from being spent and to shut this whole thing down,” Kyger said. “Deutch has a policy of no new launch vehicle programs, period.”

Jan Walker, a Pentagon spokeswoman for Deutch, had no comment on the DC-X’s funding.

Besides its technical accomplishments, the DC-X had provided a welcome splash of good publicity for McDonnell, which has been burdened by its troubled C-17 cargo plane, sluggish passenger jet orders and cutbacks in its space station work.

So why doesn’t McDonnell simply spend the $5 million to keep the rocket going?

“Even $5 million these days is quite precious to all companies,” said McDonnell’s Gaubatz. Moreover, he said, McDonnell probably would have to spend at least another $2 million to relocate the DC-X’s operation to another site.

“It just gets to be so open-ended that it’s not a practical plan at this point,” he said.

Gaubatz said that while he’s disappointed the DC-X program could abruptly end, McDonnell collected valuable data from its tests that will be applied to future spacecraft. Even though the DC-X sits idle on the ground, he said, “we’re still on a high from what has been accomplished.”