Bunny-Hopping into Space

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

None of the spectators at the Army's White Sands Missile Range had ever seen anything quite like it. With a burst of smoke and a flash of light, a 40-ft.- tall white obelisk shuddered briefly, popped off a launch pad and rose 150 ft. over the New Mexico desert. Then it suddenly stopped in midair, moved sideways for 350 ft. and started back down, engines firing all the way. At the last moment, four rodlike pods shot out of the tail to ease the bullet-shaped rocket gently to the ground.

It was the first time a spacecraft had ever come back to earth tailfirst, although similar landings have been made on Mars and the moon. "My jaw dropped," says Tom Williams, director of communications for McDonnell Douglas, the defense contractor that built the odd-looking rocket. "I'd never seen a space vehicle stop on a dime before. It was like something in a monster movie."

But the Delta Clipper-Experimental (or DC-X) is quite real, and its brief maiden voyage last week -- space engineers called it a "bunny hop" -- could signal the start of a new era in space travel. A grandchild of the original Star Wars program, the Delta Clipper is designed to accomplish precisely what the space shuttle promised but never delivered: cheap, dependable access to space.

Everything about the DC-X, from its basic components to the speed with which it moved from the computer-aided design screens and onto the launch pad -- the first stage of development took just 18 months -- shows how much was lost in the past two decades, a period in which the U.S. space program was all but stalled. The current fleet of American launch vehicles -- including the shuttle that balked on launch in mid-August and the Titan IV launcher that exploded in midair 11 days before that -- were built from blueprints drawn in the 1960s and '70s, a lifetime ago in terms of research into materials, semiconductors and computer design.

Constructed of epoxy and graphite-fiber composites and crammed with advanced electronics, the DC-X was designed to take advantage of a burst of technological progress -- and it shows. Thanks to a skin as thin as a credit card, which replaces the heavy aluminum shell of conventional spacecraft, the rocket is light enough to leap into orbit in a single bound, avoiding the wasteful shedding of expensive booster stages. The DC-X is the world's first fully reusable spacecraft, and its myriad computer systems make it easy to launch and repair. It can be fired off by a crew of three, far fewer than the army of 1,700 needed by the shuttle. Bottom line: the Delta Clipper should be able to carry 10-ton payloads to orbit -- manned or unmanned -- for $500 to $1,000 per lb., compared with 28 tons a load at $10,000 per lb. for the space shuttle.

There are still some obstacles to overcome. The rocket that flew last week is a prototype that is only one-third the size of the planned vehicle. Even if the DC-X continues to perform well (the next flight is scheduled for this week), it could take five years and at least $2 billion before a full-scale Delta Clipper is ready for business. But aerospace executives are already dreaming about the day when getting into orbit costs no more than a transatlantic flight. Among their pet ideas: nuclear-waste disposal, space- based advertising and low-earth-orbit tourism. A weekend visit to a space station, anyone?

With reporting by Ellen Germain/Washington and Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque