Starship Asterisk*

A news item in the UK journal New Scientist made me aware of the USAF X-37 project.

This reusable, orbiting, unmanned spacecraft looks awfully like a cutdown Shuttle, and the current X-37B has just returned to Earth after a 469 day mission where it is suspected of observing the Chinese Tiangong spacelab. The X-37C is expected to be big enough to carry up to six astronauts, though if the design is so autonomous it is likely that they will be passengers, not pilots.

So is the US, and Boeing preserving it's Shuttle legacy in the X-37? Can we expect to see more re-usable spacecraft that fly back down instead of just ballistic re-entrys?

John

JohnD wrote:So is the US, and Boeing preserving it's Shuttle legacy in the X-37? Can we expect to see more re-usable spacecraft that fly back down instead of just ballistic re-entrys?

The generic concept "shuttle" certainly isn't dead, nor is the technology. Much of the technology in the original shuttles was obsolete, and there were growing maintenance issues. Also, they were difficult to justify from a cost standpoint, and there was little need for them. Certainly, derivative technology has made its way into these new experimental spacecraft. Whether or not they ultimately play a significant role in the space program depends, I would think, on the degree to which they prove useful. Most of the things the shuttles were used for were better handled by simpler, ordinary rockets. So our usage of the near-Earth space environment really needs to change if shuttles are going to make sense.