NASA to Name Designers for Reusable Space Orbiter

In a bold effort to produce the next-generation space shuttle and restore U.S. preeminence to the business of building rocket launchers, NASA will pick a team today to design a reusable orbiter.

At stake in the NASA program is whether the United States can halt the erosion in its share of the growing worldwide commercial launch market. NASA intends to show that the nation still has superior rocket technology and an enduring lust for space.

The winner of the $941-million NASA program, known as the X-33, will be announced today by Vice President Al Gore at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Three contractors are battling for the award: Rockwell International Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and McDonnell Douglas Corp.

All of the contractors base their rocket engineers in Los Angeles or Orange County, a telling measure of just how technically potent Southern California remains.

Regardless of which team wins, the project will provide a boost to the region’s battered aerospace industry. The contract will probably create 2,000 or more jobs, with the largest share going to the contractor leading the winning team. Even more jobs could be created if the X-33 reaches production.

The spacecraft is intended to ferry payloads into space much more frequently, and at a tremendously lower cost, than the existing shuttle fleet. Although it’s far from certain that an entire fleet would be built, the X-33 also could eventually replace the shuttle fleet to ferry people in the next decade or so.

But there’s more riding on the X-33 than simply replacing the current shuttles.

“This program is vital to the space program and to the space mission,” said Greg Simon, Gore’s chief advisor on domestic policy. “We have to move to the next generation of technology in launch systems.”

American rocket engineers--led by Southern Californians--once so dominated their field that no nation even dreamed of challenging U.S. preeminence in space. But all of that changed dramatically during the past decade as U.S. launch firms lost 60% of the world launch market to such rivals as Ariane-space of France.

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In a remarkably blunt assessment, NASA Chief Daniel Goldin told a congressional panel earlier this year that the entire American space community should “hang its head in shame” for failing to protect longtime U.S. leadership in building space rocket launchers. That loss came despite continued U.S. leadership in the commercial satellite business.

But Simon predicted that when the X-33 matures, the United States will regain its leadership in the commercial launch field, despite the big market share losses so far.

Whether the X-33 replaces the shuttle depends not only on the success of technical teams but on the ability of NASA to win congressional battles over space spending. Indeed, the teams’ existing designs do not yet include room for pilots and other astronauts.

The initial prototype will carry no cargo, but simply demonstrate its ability to reach orbit on a single stage. The successor vehicle to the X-33 would carry about 40,000 pounds of payload into orbit, roughly what the shuttle does.

“It’s entirely possible” that the X-33 will replace the shuttles, “but there are a lot of uncertainties,” said Brian Welch, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As a result, NASA is working “to keep the shuttles flying until about the year 2010,” he said.

Rockwell, based in Seal Beach, built the existing shuttles and their main engines, and it still does maintenance work on the shuttles in Palmdale. Palmdale also is the home of Lockheed Martin’s famed “Skunk Works” advanced-design plant that designed its version of the X-33. And McDonnell Douglas’s space operations are based in Huntington Beach.

The X-33 represents the type of revolutionary technology that NASA once excelled at developing. The most radical design, from McDonnell Douglas, involves a rocket that can take off and land vertically, just like the rocket ships in old science fiction movies.

The X-33’s goal is to slash the cost of lifting payloads into space. The typical shuttle launch now costs about $500 million--or $5,000 to $10,000 per pound--whereas the X-33’s goal is closer to $1,000 per pound, Welch said.

“This new spacecraft is going to have to be thousands of times better than the old shuttle,” said John Pike, a space expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “That is going to be hard to do.”

Although Pike says NASA can succeed in getting an X-33 into orbit, the bigger question is whether it can reduce current launch costs.

Both NASA and the Defense Department have had repeated false starts at updating U.S. launch systems. Existing launchers are all derived from former intercontinental ballistic missile systems designed in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1980s, NASA and the Defense Department spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the National Aero Space Plane, which was to have flown into orbit with supersonic ramjet engines. It was quietly canceled after several cutbacks two years ago.

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Goldin hopes that the X-33 will succeed where prior efforts have failed because NASA and private industry will jointly pool their resources. In fact, the contract to be announced today calls for the winning team to make a sizable investment in the project, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

But the space agency’s grand ambition also carries enormous technological and financial risks.

The goal of having the X-33 reach orbit on a single stage will require breakthroughs of the type that were routine in the 1960s but tough to achieve in the budget-pinched 1990s. New lightweight materials, exotic high-efficiency rocket engines and advanced safety systems will be needed.

Critics are also troubled by NASA’s plan to seek private financing for the eventual construction of a fleet of operational X-33 vehicles. The initial NASA contract would provide $941 million for development of only a single prototype. The unwillingness of the government to underwrite much more reveals to critics a lack of federal commitment.

Vartabedian reported from Washington and Peltz from Los Angeles.

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The Next Stage in Launch Vehicles

Aerospace companies are competing to design a new generation of reusable launch vehicles, or RLVs. The first step is to build a half-scale experimental prototype, designated X-33. NASA will choose one of these designs:

Rockwell

* Vertical takeoff, horizontal landing

* Design derived from today’s Space Shuttle

McDonnell Douglas

* Vertical takeoff, vertical landing

* Design derived from experimental “Clipper Graham”

Lockheed Martin

* Vertical takeoff, horizontal landing

* Design derived from “lifting body” aircraft

* Linear aerospike engine

Source: NASA, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin