To: AntiKev; Poohbah; section9; Dog
The good news is we're getting ambitious.
The bad news is we're scrapping the shuttles - and I'd prefer to have our own form of getting to the space station as opposed to relying on the Europeans or Russians.
Time to bring back the X-30, X-33, and the Delta Clipper?
5 posted on
01/09/2004 8:36:31 AM PST by
hchutch
(Why did the Nazgul run from Arwen's flash flood? All they managed to do was to end up dying tired.)
To: hchutch
The X-30 was simply not possible--indeed, the engine technology (scramjet) has never demonstrated net thrust. The X-33 was, to quote the cavalry, "all horses**t and no gunsmoke." LockMart grossly exaggerated how much performance improvement the linear aerospike engine would produce. As for the Delta Clipper, that was a program that never had a real constituency (it was run out of the SDIO, and government funds died with the end of the SDI program), but it was definitely the most promising of the three.
9 posted on
01/09/2004 8:46:16 AM PST by
Poohbah
("Beware the fury of a patient man" -- John Dryden)
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