NASA Ends X-33 Project That Sought to Cut Spaceflight Costs

After investing five years and $1 billion, NASA Thursday killed the experimental space plane program that was the centerpiece of the agency’s effort to develop a new generation of vehicles for traveling into orbit.

The $1.3-billion X-33 project became the latest in a string of failed attempts to revolutionize the economics of space travel by cutting costs to one-tenth of today’s, making getting into space radically safer and profitable enough that industry would take over the job from government and operate it like commercial airlines. Now the agency is back to the drawing board.

The X-33 was a 69-foot-long, unpiloted prototype designed to pave the way for a larger vehicle called VentureStar that could carry people and cargo. The wedge-shaped VentureStar, which would have had a radically new type of engine called the linear aerospike, might have replaced the aging shuttle fleet, serviced the new international space station and served the needs of scientists, the military and what was expected to be a profitable array of commercial customers.

But the effort fell victim to technical setbacks, cost problems and a collapse in the anticipated launching market, officials said. “The cost to fly X-33 . . . exceeds the benefits that could be derived from flight demonstration of the vehicles,” said Art Stephenson, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which manages the launching technology procurement.

“This has been a very tough decision but we are confident it is the right business decision,” he told reporters in a telephone conference call.

The X-33 program had been in trouble for some time, and a target of critics who warned it was too ambitious. For these and other reasons, the Clinton administration had last year won congressional approval for a new initiative that will spend $4.5 billion over five years to test the most promising new technologies in a long list of key categories, including propulsion systems, orbital ferries and crew survivability techniques.

The X-33 and a smaller suborbital test vehicle called X-34 were eliminated in the just-concluded first round of competition for this new funding.