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The Lockheed Martin X-33 was a proposed uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane that was developed for a period in the 1990s. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was planned to be a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle.
VentureStar releasing a spacecraft. VentureStar was a single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch system proposed by Lockheed Martin and funded by the U.S. government. The goal was to replace the Space Shuttle by developing a re-usable spaceplane that could launch satellites into orbit at 1/10 of the cost.
It's unclear by how much, but for some idea, NASA hoped that its X-33 space plane would reduce the cost of sending a pound of payload into orbit from $10,000 to $1,000. Radian One wouldn't be a ...
Landing is done at one of three sites across the US: the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, Vandenberg Space Force Base, or Edwards Air Force Base. To return to Kennedy Space Center, the X-37 is placed into a payload canister and loaded into a Boeing C-17 cargo plane. Once at Kennedy, the X-37 is unloaded and towed to the OPF ...
The Rockwell X-30 National Aero-Space Plane (NASP), begun in the 1980s, was an attempt to build a scramjet vehicle capable of operating like an aircraft and achieving orbit like the shuttle. Introduced to the public in 1986, the concept was intended to reach Mach 25, enabling flights between Dulles Airport to Tokyo in two hours, while also ...
On the X-37B’s last mission, which spanned 908 days in orbit, the space plane lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Before that, the vehicle rode to space five times on United Launch ...
LASRE was a small, half-span model of the X-33's lifting body with eight thrust cells of an aerospike engine, rotated 90 degrees and mounted on the back of a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird aircraft, to operate like a kind of "flying wind tunnel." The experiment focused on determining how a reusable launch vehicle's engine plume would affect the ...
The U.S. military's X-37B space plane blasted off Thursday on another secretive mission that’s expected to last at least a couple of years. Like previous missions, the reusable plane resembling ...