National Aero-Space Plane contracts (1986)

National Aero-Space Plane contracts (1986)

Date	April 1986
Programme	National Aero-Space Plane (NASP); demonstrator designated X-30
Sponsors	NASA, DARPA, U.S. Air Force, SDI Organization, U.S. Navy
Airframe contractors	McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell International, General Dynamics (Boeing and Lockheed also named by the Christian Science Monitor)
Engine contractors	Rocketdyne, Pratt & Whitney (General Electric named by the Monitor)
Original cost estimate	$3.1 billion (1986)
Outcome	Terminated 1993; closed out by the end of 1994; no vehicle built
Topics	Propulsion & physics (topic)
People	Ronald Reagan
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 99
Year	1986 in UFO history
Timeline	1986 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

In April 1986 the U.S. government awarded the first major development contracts for the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP), a joint NASA–Pentagon programme to build an aircraft that could take off from a runway and climb to orbit in a single stage using air-breathing scramjet engines. The flight demonstrator was later designated the X-30.^[1][2] Over the next seven years the programme ran into technical problems, delays and rising costs. By late 1992 the projected cost of building and testing two X-30s had grown to about $17 billion, nearly five times the original $3.1 billion estimate.^[6][7] NASP was terminated in 1993 before any vehicle was built.^[1] It appears in UFO literature because an anonymous timeline of UAP-related events lists the 1986 contracts next to an entry on the rumoured "Aurora" black aircraft.^[9]

Origins

• The NASP concept is thought to have grown out of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called "Copper Canyon", which ran from 1982 to 1985.^[1]
• In his State of the Union address in February 1986, President Ronald Reagan called for "a new Orient Express". He said that by the end of the next decade it could take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate to 25 times the speed of sound, and reach low Earth orbit or fly to Tokyo within two hours.^[1] The administration then asked for about $600 million over three years to explore the technology. Until then NASA and the Pentagon had spent less than $50 million a year on space-plane research.^[2]
• Early research suggested scramjet aircraft would be limited to about Mach 8, because compressing the incoming air heats the vehicle. The programme found that much of that heat could be recovered by running the hydrogen fuel over the skin and carrying the heat into the combustion chamber, which made Mach 20 seem possible.^[1]
• Funding was split roughly equally among NASA, DARPA, the U.S. Air Force, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and the U.S. Navy.^[1]

The contracts

• In April 1986 McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell International and General Dynamics each received contracts of no more than $35 million to develop airframe technology for a hypersonic, air-breathing single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Rocketdyne and Pratt & Whitney each received $175 million for engines and propulsion. The airframe makers were to compete, with two or three eliminated after a year. Contracts to build a flight demonstrator were planned for 42 months later, at the end of 1989.^[1]
• The Christian Science Monitor's report that month, by staff writer Scott Armstrong, put the awards at "some $400 million" for propulsion and airframe work. It named a slightly different set of firms: General Electric and Pratt & Whitney for propulsion, and Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics and Rockwell International for airframes.^[2] The earlier version of this article followed the Wikipedia figures only. The two sources differ on the engine contractors and on the total, which the Wikipedia figures would put at about $455 million.
• The Monitor said as much as $3 billion might be needed before a prototype flew, probably in the mid-1990s.^[2] The GAO later gave the 1986 estimate for the whole programme as $3.1 billion.^[8]
• Supporters made big claims. Roger D. Schaufele, vice-president of engineering at McDonnell Douglas, told Congress that the programme held "the key to regaining" America's former lead in aerospace. Raymond Colladay, NASA's associate administrator for aeronautics and space technology, testified that the technical challenges were formidable but that there was no question the technology could eventually be made ready.^[2]
• Greg Reck, the programme's deputy director of technology, told the Monitor that the project went well beyond anything engineers had direct experience with in flight vehicles. The engine would in effect be three propulsion systems in one: turbines at low speed, the shock of incoming air acting as the compressor at higher speed, and rocket power in orbit, where there is no oxygen.^[2]
• The Monitor noted that the Pentagon saw a possible quick-reaction spy plane. The programme's profile had also risen after the Challenger disaster of January 1986, and Britain was funding design work on its own HOTOL space plane.^[2]

Design

• The X-30 was to be a waverider. A shovel-shaped forward fuselage would compress air ahead of the scramjet, and the rear fuselage would serve as the exhaust nozzle. Most of the lift would come from the body, and the small "wings" would be trim and control fins. The original design had a conical nose that later gave way to the flat shovel shape. This layout suited high speeds but would have made take-off, landing and slow flight difficult.^[1]
• Much of the airframe was expected to reach 980 °C, with more than 1,650 °C on the leading edges and parts of the engine. That drove work on titanium aluminides, carbon–carbon composites and titanium metal-matrix composites reinforced with silicon-carbide fibres. As designed, the X-30 would have been 160 ft long with a 74 ft span, a gross weight of 300,000 lb and a single scramjet burning slush hydrogen.^[1]
• A 1986 paper on NASP, written by a student in NASA Ames Research Center's summer high-school apprenticeship programme and published in the programme's collected papers in 1988, described the same engine and heating problems. It also listed the plane's possible roles as an "Orient Express" airliner, a shuttle to orbit, a tactical fighter or bomber, and a high-altitude spy plane.^[3] The earlier version of this article called this source a NASA technical report and said NASP's history is "well documented in NASA technical reports". The cited document is in fact a short student essay, not a programme history.

Difficulties

• In 1990 the competing contractors joined forces as a single team led by Rockwell International, and development of the vehicle, now designated the X-30, began.^[1]
• The Department of Defense wanted the X-30 to carry a crew of two and a small payload. The instruments, life support and safety equipment needed for a crewed vehicle made it larger, heavier and more expensive than a technology demonstrator had to be.^[1]
• In March 1992 testimony, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said the programme was still in the second of three phases, developing critical technologies, structures and a demonstration engine. Cost-cutting meant the X-30 might never make the single-stage-to-orbit flight that had been its original main goal. There was no official cost estimate, but preliminary figures suggested costs could exceed five times the 1986 estimate of $3.1 billion. The GAO blamed delays on funding limits and slow technical progress.^[8]
• The GAO's December 1992 report, National Aero-Space Plane: Restructuring Future Research and Development Efforts, described seven years of "turmoil, changes in focus, and unmet expectations". Phase II was nearly five years behind schedule, a quarter of its tests had not been done, and the decision to build the X-30 depended on unsolved problems with weight, complexity and low-speed engine thrust. Contractor estimates for two orbit-capable X-30s totalled about $17 billion. The GAO said pressure to compete for funding had raised unrealistic expectations, and that DOD and NASA had based their projections of economic benefit on overly optimistic assumptions.^[7]
• The GAO recommended postponing the decision, scheduled for September 1993, to build and test the X-30 until the critical technologies had been demonstrated.^[6]
• In 1992 a McDonnell Douglas fuselage section called "Task D", 4 ft high, 8 ft wide and 8 ft long, made of titanium matrix composite with an integrated carbon/epoxy hydrogen tank, was tested with hydrogen aboard under mechanical loads at 820 °C, shortly before the programme ended.^[1]

Cancellation

• The X-30 programme was terminated in 1993 amid budget cuts and technical concerns.^[1] According to the GAO's follow-up notes, Congress judged NASP unaffordable. Neither DOD nor NASA asked for NASP funds for fiscal 1995, and the remaining work was to be finished by the end of 1994. Funds were instead requested for a new, smaller "hypersonic flight technology" programme run by the same management team, which was itself considered unaffordable and likely to shrink. The GAO's recommendations were closed because there was no longer any plan to build an experimental single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.^[6]

Legacy

• A more modest hypersonic programme culminated in NASA's uncrewed X-43 "Hyper-X". A one-third-scale (50 ft) mock-up of the X-30, built by students at Mississippi State University's Raspet Flight Research Laboratory, is displayed at the Aviation Challenge campus of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.^[1][5]

The Aurora connection

• The anonymous UAP timeline in the journalist Michael Shellenberger's November 2024 written testimony to the House Oversight Committee lists the April 1986 contracts on page 99. It describes the plan as ambitious and notes that it was cancelled in 1993. Its only source is the Wikipedia article on the X-30.^[9]
• The entry just before it describes a 1985 procurement document that budgeted $80 million in fiscal 1986 and $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987 for an "Aurora" programme, rumoured to be an advanced black aircraft. The timeline notes that Lockheed's former Skunk Works chief said in 1994 that the line was stealth-bomber funding, and says this "has not been corroborated".^[9] The timeline itself does not claim that NASP was a cover for Aurora. The earlier version of this article said "some researchers" believe NASP may have masked or been confused with more exotic work, but no source read here makes that argument.
• No substantial evidence that Aurora was ever built has been found, and it has been called a myth. Ben Rich, the former Skunk Works director, wrote in his 1994 book Skunk Works that a Pentagon colonel had attached the name to funding for the B-2 bomber competition. Sightings and unexplained sonic booms in California and Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s were attributed to Aurora, but nothing ever tied them to a specific programme or aircraft. Aviation writer Bill Sweetman nevertheless argued in 2006 that Aurora was most likely in development.^[4]

People and topics

• McDonnell Douglas — The aerospace company that ran several quiet studies of UFOs and propulsion.
• Ronald Reagan — 40th U.S. president whose diary and speeches touched on space and alien threats.
• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.

On the Timeline

• Aurora budget line (1985) (1985) — Budget papers suggest the Pentagon planned large spending on an 'Aurora' program.
• Wild Weasel UFO detections claim (22 June 1986) — A former contractor tells Vallée Vietnam-era aircraft detected UAP with special equipment.

See every 1986 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Rockwell X-30”, “Aurora (aircraft)”, “en.wikipedia.org”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.