McDonnell Douglas' Landable Rocket About to Be Mothballed : Aerospace: Despite successful tests, the Defense Department's funding for the project is running out.We'll see what we'll see...
January 27, 1994It 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.
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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.
Well you seem to be assuming that fuel is the only real cost to go to space.
Fuel is weight. When they launch a rocket with chemical propellant placing a 5+ ton payload in LEO (plus fuel & rocket) and land it vertically, I'll eat my hat. It's been over 20 years...IMHO 'fanciful' is apropos. "Bridge to nowhere" comes to mind...
I stand corrected! I’m surprised the DC-X didn’t gain traction (no pun intended) at NASA. Then again, a government agency does not have the same cost/benefit impetus that a private company does.
Rocket propulsion is literally the most efficient chemical propulsion known to exist. The only reusable system yet devised was the STS, and it cost between $500 million and $1 billion just to launch and recycle, every single time.
The proposed man-rated vehicle to put Americans back into space on American hardware won’t be able to get off the ground without extended versions of the solid rocket boosters used on the STS. It would literally be possible to just forget about the new liquid-fueled system — which is a pork barrel and nothing more — and loft future astronauts on the (reusable) SRBs.
It won’t happen.