In the 1990s, NASA designed an experimental space plane meant to be a cost-effective alternative to expensive rockets.

This company wants to reinvent the space rocket — as a space plane

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2024-09-02 20:00:17

In the 1990s, NASA designed an experimental space plane meant to be a cost-effective alternative to expensive rockets.

Called the X-33, it was based on a concept called SSTO — or “single stage to orbit.” SSTO does away with the rocket stages of conventional space flight — where rockets containing engines and fuel and are dropped during ascent to shed weight — instead favoring a fully reusable single spacecraft.

The X-33 was designed to launch vertically like a rocket, but land on a runway like a plane, with the goal of reducing the cost of sending a pound of payload into orbit from $10,000 to just $1,000.

The program, however, was canceled in 2001 due to technical difficulties, adding to a list of similar projects that have failed to materialize.

“I led the X-33 program, and we opted out of it because our assessment was that it was going to cost more than we were going to bargain for, and we were right at the edge of the technological capability to actually pull it off,” says Livingston Holder, an aerospace engineer, former USAF astronaut and program manager of X-33, and now CTO of Radian Aerospace — a Seattle-based company he co-founded in 2016 to revive the dream of the SSTO.