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Comment by pixie_ | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a lot of good technology was lost with the cancellation of the X-33/VentureStar. They were very close, and a few test failures caused the entire program to be shut down. It's really a shame.

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Well... even more bad technology was lost with the cancellation of the X-33. It was a horrifically over-complicated design which had everything including the kitchen sink thrown into it, strictly to maximise its potential for congressional pork. I'm serious. I was actually at a Lockheed-Martin briefing prior to the X-33 competition, wherein they presented a slide which looked like this:

  TECHNICAL FEATURES
  * Linear aerospike engine [first ever tried]
  * Conformal composite LH2 tank [first ever tried]
  * Integrated advanced metallic thermal protection [first ever tried]
  * Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts

The level of complexity in the Venturestar design meant that it could never have achieved the lightweight mass fractions needed for an SSTO. If there is ever to be an SSTO, it will be simple and elegant. But "simple" and "infinitely divisible into a large number of congressional districts" are mutually incompatible, which is why the US government chose the Lockheed Martin design over the vastly more realistic Macdonald Douglas DC-Y: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dcy.htm

It's a shame that they decided to run back this same approach for the F-35.

A leap too far. You could test and mature those technologies further independently (in the lab, at test stands, flying tests with existing vehicles) at much lower cost before trying to integrate them into a design that costs billions.

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