At the dawn of the space race, NASA benefited from a huge budget flow to achieve your most ambitious goals. And he really achieved extraordinary achievements, such as the development of the Apollo Program, which allowed 12 astronauts to set foot on the Moon in different missions.
However, as space exploration progressed, the US agency began to find a balance between reducing the cost of access to space and increasing the number of missions. The Space Shuttle Program, which formally began in 1972, promised to be the cornerstone of these goals.
Travel to space regularly and without spending a fortune
NASA’s idea was simple enough: build a series of reusable space vehicles long enough to large, robust and reliable so that they could be used to frequently visit low Earth orbit. This would serve to build an American space station and carry astronauts.
The Space Shuttle became a reality, but it didn’t meet all of its goals. While it was an engineering marvel, it was an extremely complex and expensive vehicle. Technically it should have carried out more than twenty missions a year, making getting into space much easier than before.
The statistics, on the other hand, showed the opposite. They were making an average of four annual missionswith a cost of approximately $1.2 billion per mission. One of the reasons the releases were so expensive was because certain parts, like the external tank, were not reusable.
Takeoff of the Space Shuttle
It had reached a point where the agency began to consider various options as substitutes for some tasks carried out by the Space Shuttle, for example, to put some satellites into orbit or transport passengers to the new space station. Thus, the concept of the VentureStar single-stage reusable vehicle was born.
NASA would finance part of the research and development project, but Lockheed Martin would own these ships, that would be rented by the US space agency. At the cost level, flights to low Earth orbit should cost much less thanks to the proposed design and technological improvements.
Part of the VentureStar project team
The VentureStar was advertised as a completely different vehicle than the Space Shuttle. First of all, although it could carry a crew, it would not need pilots and would work with an autonomous flight system. The breakthrough was not entirely new. The Soviet Burán shuttle from the 1980s could fly autonomously.
In any case, this would not be the only innovation of the VentureStar. Those behind the project apparently wanted solve almost all difficulties that had tarnished the Space Shuttle. One of them was that, unlike the latter, it would not need an external tank and solid fuel propellants.
The key to the new space vehicle would be in its Aerospike XRS-2200 linear motors that they would be able to maintain their efficiency over a wide range of altitudes and would make single-stage design possible. At the fuel level, the ship would rise with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, avoiding highly polluting compounds such as the Shuttle’s hydrogen chloride.
XRS-2200 aerospike linear motor test
The VentureStar would have also innovated in the thermal protection system. Instead of using ceramic tiles that were expensive to maintain and needed to be thoroughly checked before flight, the concept proposed a metallic protection system safer and cheaper. Also, in an emergency, the vehicle could land at almost any airport in the world like a conventional aircraft.
VentureStar Concept
All this was not mere ideas, but the program received an important boost in its beginnings. Lockheed Martin and NASA were very committed to the project and in 1996 construction began on a technology demonstrator known as the X-33. The roadmap established that the first flight would take place in March 1999.
But the project began to suffer many difficulties. Aerospike engines and fuel tanks failed to exceed minimum performance requirements and exhibited a failure chain during testing. The program finally it was canceled in 2001 when the demonstrator prototype was 85% assembled with 96% of the parts and the launch facility was ready.
The VentureStar dream was dashed even after NASA had spent $922 million on the project and Lockheed Martin another $357 million. The truth is that the space industry has changed substantially since then. Currently, the US agency maintains strong ties with private players such as SpaceX, which not only send satellites and astronauts into space at a fraction of the price required by the Space Shuttle.
Images: POT
