ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030054
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Associated Press and The Boston Globe
NOTE: Lede
With a radical design for a fully reusable spaceship that could blast into orbit without discarding any components, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin on Tuesday won a three-way competition to develop a new generation of manned spacecraft to replace the space shuttle.
``You don't have to be a rocket scientist to appreciate the importance of this moment,'' Vice President Al Gore told an enthusiastic crowd of space agency workers as he announced the winner of the competition among three leading companies for a contract worth almost $1 billion. The prototype rocket is to begin test flights in 1999.
The Lockheed Martin design, produced by the company's Advanced Development division - known as the Skunk Works - features two innovations never before used in an operational rocket: A ``lifting body'' design in which the entire spacecraft acts like a big wing during landings on conventional runways; and a ``linear aerospike'' rocket engine that uses the pressure of the passing air, rather than a traditional bell-shaped rocket nozzle, to shape the exhaust gases from the rocket.
``It shows the agency is willing to take risks,'' said Edward Crowley, director of the Aero and Astro department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of the choice of Lockheed Martin's design. ``That's technologically the most challenging'' of the three designs, he said.
Crowley, a member of an advisory board that evaluated the proposals for NASA, praised the selection, saying the choice was ``the one that's going to really advance the technology.''
NASA administrator Daniel Goldin said ``this is a historic day for the space program'' and could lead to the day when dramatically lower costs for getting into orbit will allow thousands of people, not just a few dozen, to travel into space every year, and whole new industries to develop involving advanced communication systems or Earth observations.
``Now we fly dozens of astronauts a year,'' he said. ``This vehicle should allow hundreds a year to fly, and vehicles that come beyond it to allow thousands of people to fly.''
The experimental X-33 rocket is expected to lead to a fully reusable spaceship to replace the current fleet of four space shuttles. NASA hopes the new craft will cut launch costs to a fraction of what they are for the shuttle and be more reliable than the shuttle.
The X-33 also should be able to land and take off again in a few days, rather than the four months it takes to get a shuttle ready for a new mission.
``It's been 25 years since America developed a new rocket engine or a new rocket,'' Goldin said, and in that time the nation's share of the world market for launching commercial satellites has declined from 100 percent to about 35 percent. The new reusable rocket, he said, should ``give this nation new leadership, to win back the 65 percent of the business we lost.''
Everyone agrees the program is not without risk. Reaching orbit with a single-stage vehicle requires that the entire spacecraft, plus its cargo and crew, weigh only 11 percent of the total liftoff weight. The other 89 percent is required for the fuel. No rocket has ever come close to that ``mass fraction,'' and there's no guarantee that it can be achieved.
``That is a question about which reasonable people can disagree,'' said MIT's Crowley, who had been openly skeptical of the concept. If the whole vehicle can be held to 11 percent of the liftoff weight, he said, that means the payload - whether it's passengers, cargo or a satellite to be launched - can only be about 1 or 2 percent of the total liftoff weight. So if the calculations used to design the rocket ``were in error by a percent or two, there could be no payload at all.''
Whatever the result, Crowley said, the project will be worth doing because even if the single-stage version proves impractical, the same technologies tested in the X-33 could instead be applied to a slightly modified version using two stages, and still achieve significant savings in launch costs.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: KRT. color.by CNB