Behind the Air Force's Secret Robotic Space Plane


By Sharon Weinberger
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Reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) and space planes have suffered from the promises of scientists and politicians who overestimated their utility and underestimated their complexity. The X-20 Dyna-Soar, a flat-bottom glider that used rockets to take off but made powerless landings, was touted as an unstoppable hypersonic space bomber but was canceled in 1963. Designers billed the quixotic single-stage-to-orbit X-30 as a new Orient Express, leading President Ronald Reagan to say in a 1986 speech that it would be able to "take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate [to] up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours." But as the complexities of reusable spacecraft became clearer, the government started cutting space planes from the budget.

NASA took over the development of RLVs from the Pentagon in the 1990s, but critics soon assailed the agency for pursuing endless testbeds rather than operational spacecraft. One of the most ambitious space planes of the era was the X-33, a 69-foot-high craft that did not need a heavy rocket to reach orbit. A test craft was nearly complete in 1999 when engineers discovered cracks in the overweight vehicle's fuel tank. NASA officials canceled the program in 2001, and like nearly all previous space planes, it never flew. "The X-33 required at least one miracle," Lewis says.

In a 2001 congressional hearing, Henry Cooper, the former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, blamed both NASA and the Air Force for killing space planes: "The Air Force has not been a serious advocate for military space programs-otherwise it would not have supported transferring the reusable launch mission to NASA, an organization that has shown little responsiveness to supporting innovative military space programs."

But civilian space planes did not perform as expected, either. The space shuttle failed to reach its primary goals of making transportation to space cheaper and more efficient. The prospects for a new generation of reusable space planes went from bad to catastrophic when, on Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry. NASA's shuttle program, which was originally supposed to carry the X-37 orbital test vehicle, faced an early retirement, and the agency lost interest in RLVs and space planes.

The X-37B, though more modest than its predecessors, seemed to be on a familiar path to extinction. NASA started work on the X-37 in 1999, and soon after, agency officials developed a plan to build an approach and landing test vehicle and an orbital test vehicle. But in 2004 NASA dropped them both. The Defense Department then adopted the X-37 and placed it under the auspices of its research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

DARPA contracted Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites to conduct drop tests of the X-37 off its White Knight carrier aircraft over California. (The jet-powered White Knight gained fame as the mother ship that launched SpaceShipOne, the suborbital craft that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.)

In 2006, the X-37 again changed hands, this time going from DARPA to the Air Force, and a cloak of secrecy fell over the program. The new plan focused on building a single orbital test vehicle, rebranded as the X-37B. "I can't say a lot about it," says Lewis, the former Air Force chief scientist. "I had to actually start asking questions about what this thing is, because it was being kept so secret."

The presumption that the space plane's mission is important because it's classified might be a smokescreen, says John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org. "Maybe it's a bad idea," he says. There are reasons for a military program to go "black" that don't have to do with national security.

Secrecy also protects the X-37B and its funding. With tight budgets and skeptics alert for failure, "you put it in the black and you operate it without telling people," Sabathier says. The Air Force declines to disclose how much it's spending on the X-37B, and, because of the classified status, the figure is not otherwise available.


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