NASA offered a glimpse of the shape of space travel in the 21st century yesterday when it unveiled the winning design in a competition to build a replacement for its ageing fleet of shuttles.
The US Vice President, Mr Al Gore, announced that Lockheed Martin will build the new generation of reusable spacecraft, the first to be privately built and owned. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of this moment," he told a crowd at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, describing the company's new rocket design as "a high tech marvel".
The Lockheed design, a delta shaped craft that can take off almost as easily as an aircraft, beat competition from the aerospace giants McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell International.
Nasa has come under increasing pressure to justify its existence since the end of the Cold War. It hopes that privatising the design and operation of the new shuttles will substantially reduce the cost of space research and the launching of satellites.
The agency will pay almost craft, the first new rocket design since 1972. The price is a snip since it is estimated the new spacecraft will cost between
The new spacecraft will ultimately be owned and operated by Lockheed and leased to Nasa. The agency hopes the combination of the advanced design with the economies of privatisation will reduce the cost of putting a pound of payload into orbit from around
The craft, which unlike the shuttles currently in use will have no throwaway parts, will be able to make up to 50 flights a year. Currently Nasa manages just seven or eight launches a year with its ageing fleet, far fewer than was envisaged when President Nixon launched the shuttle programme in 1972.
The agency has come under intense pressure to prune the shuttle programme's
In October a joint venture formed by Lockheed and Rockwell will begin taking over the running of the existing shuttles as part of an effort to cut costs.
It is hoped that the X-33 craft will come into operation by 2007.
(Guard/at Service)
AFP adds from Beijing: China yesterday launched an Apstar-1A satellite from a site in the southwest of the country, four and a half months after a Long March 3B rocket carrying an Intelsat satellite exploded, killing six people, state television said. It was built by the US firm, Hughes Aircraft, for a Hong Kong company, APT Satellite Corp Ltd, and successfully entered orbit.