orbital space plane

If California is the nursery of the alternative space agenda, Mojave is the crib. Here—just a few miles from Edwards Air Force Base, where the remnants of Lockheed Martin’s ill-fated, billion-dollar X-33 orbital space plane sit mothballed—seven private rocket companies have set up shop. Most famous is of course Scaled Composites, whose majordomo, Burt Rutan, is widely expected to capture the $10 million X Prize for the first private vehicle to travel to space twice in two weeks. But at the lesser-known XCOR Aerospace, work proceeds apace.

Six months after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas, experts concluded that the immediate cause of the February 1 disaster was an errant piece of insulating foam—but that the fundamental fault lay with the space agency itself. “NASA’s organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as foam did,” the Columbia Accident Investigation Board declared in its 248-page report, released in August.

Last November, NASA took decisive action on its two-and-a-half-year-old plan to replace the aging space shuttle.



It cut the heart out of the project.