Suzy B Software 2/Suzy B Software CD-ROM 2 (1994).iso/nasa/dcxinfo7/1004bkgd.txt

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                             DC-X Background

       Copyright 1993 by Henry Vanderbilt and Space Access Society.

This is a companion piece to our more-or-less weekly "Space Access Update".
We're splitting this off for the convenience of those who've already seen the
background material.  The background material will occasionally be updated;
most recent change dates for the various sections are included.

 - DC-X Hardware Background (8/28/93)
 - Backgrounder: The Annual US Congressional Funding Process (10/4/93)
 - Contacting Your Congressman: Hints and Tips  (9/9/93)
 - DC-X Followon: Political Background (8/28/93)


         DC-X Hardware Background (last changed August 28th 1993)

DC-X is a low-speed flight regime testbed for a proposed reusable rocket-
powered Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) transport, McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace's
"Delta Clipper".  DC-X is intended to prove out rocket-powered vertical
takeoff, nose-first lifting-body to tail-first flight transition, and tail-
first landing.  It is also intended to prove out rapid turnaround of a
reusable rocket by a minimal ground support crew.  DC-X is being tested and
flown by approximately thirty people.

DC-X has already pretty much proved out rapid low-cost development of an
advanced aerospace X-vehicle type engineering testbed by a small highly-
motivated engineering team on a tight budget.  DC-X was built by less than
two hundred people, in less than two years, for about $60 million.  Of
course, this sort of thing has been done before -- just not recently.

DC-X stands 40 feet tall, is 13 feet across the base, and is roughly cone-
shaped, with a circular cross-section forward blending into a square base.
The vehicle has four maneuvering flaps, one set into each side near the base,
and sits on four landing legs.  DC-X masses 22,300 lbs empty and 41,630 lbs
fully fuelled, and is powered by four 13,500 lb thrust Pratt & Whitney RL-10-
A5 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen rocket motors, each able to gimbal +- 8
degrees.  The RL-10-A5 is a special version of the RL-10-A designed for wide
throttling range (30% to 100%) and sea-level operation.

The single DC-X vehicle was officially rolled out of its construction hangar
at MDA's Huntington Beach CA plant at the start of April, then trucked out to
White Sands, New Mexico for ground and then flight tests.

Between Thursday, May 20th and Thursday, June 17th, DC-X underwent a series
of nine engine firings/vehicle systems exercises, including two firings in
one day with complete defueling/vehicle servicing/refueling in between.

On Friday, June 18th, the DC-X crew began breaking down the ground support
equipment and moving it to the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) flight test
site, a distance of about fifty miles.  Meanwhile DC-X was stored in a hangar.

On Friday, July 16th, the ground support equipment move was completed.  DC-X
was taken out of storage, trucked out to the flight test site, and hoisted
upright onto its launch pad.

On Monday, July 19th, the DC-X crew began running a series of ground tests to
make sure everything had made it over intact and was hooked back together
properly.

On Wednesday, August 18th, at 4:43 pm MDT, DC-X made its first flight, a
"bunny hop" stability test that involved climbing 150 feet vertically,
hovering, translating slowly sideways 350 feet, then landing vertically.  The
rocket was under precise control throughout, appearing to move almost as if
on rails, and landed within six inches of the target.


    Backgrounder: The Annual US Congressional Funding Process (10/4/93)

The US Congress has the power (embedded in the US Constitution) to control all
US Federal government spending.  It does this on a yearly basis (multi-year
funding is very unusual) by passing into law various spending bills.  The US
Federal fiscal year starts on October 1st of the previous calendar year, IE
FY '94 officially started on Friday, October 1st, 1993.

Congress generally starts the annual budget process in early spring, and
finishes it sometime in the autumn.  When parts of the budget run late, past
October 1st, Congress will pass a "continuing resolution" authorizing spending
to continue temporarily at the previous year's levels.  The Defense Department
is running under such a resolution as this is being written.

The Congressional funding process has two phases, "Authorization", then
"Appropriation".  Authorization is roughly equivalent to drawing up a shopping
list for the coming year, while Appropriation can be looked at as going
through the shopping list deciding how much of each item to actually buy.
Authorized budget items are often reduced or deleted in the Appropriations
process, but seldom increased, and new items are rarely added.

The Congress debates and passes "Authorizations" and "Appropriations" bills
for each major area of government, about a dozen pairs of bills in all.  The
ones we're concerned with are the Defense Department (DOD) Authorizations and
Appropriations bills.  DOD happened to be where the necessary money and
management style was when DC-X was getting started up.

Both the House of Representatives with 435 members elected in population based
districts, and the Senate with 100 members elected two per state, draw up and
pass their own versions of each "Authorizations" and "Appropriations" bill.

Authorizations bills generally originate in the appropriate specialized
committees within the House and Senate, in this case the House and Senate Armed
Services Committees (HASC and SASC).  Appropriations Bills generally originate
in specialized subcommittees of the powerful House and Senate Appropriations
Committees (HAC and SAC), in this case the HAC and SAC Defense Subcommittees.

Each bill will generally go from the subcommittee that drafts it, to the full
committee that "marks it up" (modifies it), then to the full House or Senate
that will amend it and approve it in "floor votes", votes of all members.

At this point, there will be two separate versions of the bill, House and
Senate.  There are a number of ways to come up with a common version for final
passage into law, but the method that concerns us is the "Conference
Committee", a committee with members from both House and Senate whose job is
to negotiate a compromise version.  The Conference version is then near-
automatically approved by both House and Senate, thus becoming law.

A Conference Committee is usually made up of selected members from the House
and Senate committees that wrote the bills in the first place.  Generally the
committee and subcommittee heads plus their minority party counterparts (the
"Ranking Republican Members" or RRM's on each committee and subcommittee) are
automatically included.  The House and Senate don't necessarily send equal
numbers, since Conference Committee approval requires a majority among the
House members plus a majority among the Senate members - an overall majority
of Conference Committee members is not enough.


           Contacting Your Congressman: Hints and Tips  (9/9/93)

We regularly ask you to phone, fax, or write Representatives A and B or
Senator C, and ask them to support X, Y, and Z.  Here's some tips on how to
do so painlessly and effectively.

Keep phone calls brief, polite, and to the point - tell whoever answers (very
likely an underpaid, overworked staffer who's never heard of what you're
supporting) that you're calling to let them know you support $80 million in
DOD funding next year for BMDO's SSRT ("Single Stage Rocket Technology")
program, and if you feel like it, throw in your favorite reason why this would
be a good thing.  If the person who answers wants to know more, answer their
questions as best you can, otherwise thank them and ring off.

Letters, whether via USPS or fax, should also be brief, polite, and to the
point, though you can go into a bit more detail as to why a DC-X followon is
the neatest thing since sliced bread and good for the country too.  Keep it
under a page and state your basic point at the start, so if they're in a
hurry they can figure out what you're trying to tell them with a quick scan.

Don't overdo it, but in general try to know who you're contacting and
emphasize benefits likely to appeal to them, given their positions on the
political spectrum.  Don't give them a laundry list; pick one or two reasons
to support SSRT and explain them succinctly in your own words.

Future US aerospace technological competitiveness plus stemming the ongoing
US loss of international space launch marketshare should appeal to just about
anyone.  Reusable launchers in general promise an order-of-magnitude or more
reduction in launch costs, and SX-2 would demonstrate technologies applicable
to any reusable launcher, not just Delta Clipper.

Some benefits worth mentioning:

 - defense conversion benefits due to the dual-use nature of SSTO technology.
   (civilian space launch applications)
 - economic benefits of improved US international aerospace competitiveness.
   (We used to have 100% of the international launch market.  That's dropped
   to 40%, losing us billions each year.  Cheaper launch will let us compete.)
 - environmental benefits of reusable hydrogen-powered rockets. (no scrap
   metal dumped downrange, nothing but water vapor for exhaust)
 - the economic benefits to (Colorado, New Mexico, California, Florida,
   Arizona, etc) of launch vehicles operable from or built in that state.
 - if you're so inclined, the benefit of diverting DOD funds that might
   otherwise go for weapons R&D.
 - if you're so inclined, the security benefits of cheap rapid assured access
   to space for monitoring of rapidly changing situations.


   DC-X Followon: Political Background (last changed August 28th 1993)

The current DC-X program is funded through flight test and data analysis this
fall, and ends after that.  There is an ongoing effort to get the US Congress
to fund a three-year followon program, currently called SX-2 (Space
Experimental 2).  This tentatively looks like being a reusable suborbital
vehicle powered by 8 RL-10-A5 engines, capable of reaching Mach 6 (about 1/4
orbital velocity) and 100 miles altitude, built with orbital-weight tanks and
structure, and able to test orbital grade heat-shielding.

The SX-2 program goal will be to demonstrate all remaining technology needed
to build a reusable single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.  Once SX-2 has been
tested, all that should be necessary to produce a functioning reusable SSTO
is to scale up the SX-2 structures and install more powerful rocket engines.

[Developing such engines in parallel to SX-2 is likely to be SAS's next big
push.  Existing engines could work for an orbital proof-of-concept vehicle,
but new engines optimized for SSTO operations would be preferable -HV]

Proposed FY '94 funding for SX-2 startup is $75 million.  Total SX-2 program
cost over the next three years would be very much dependent on the contractor
chosen and the details of the design, but would be on the order of several
hundred million.  This is the same order of magnitude as typical recent X-
aircraft programs such as the X-29 and X-31.

The $75 million SX-2 startup money now looks like being added to the Advanced
Research Project Agency (ARPA) budget, with at least some of the funding in
following years to come from other interested arms of the government.  SX-2
would still be run by the current BMDO (formerly SDIO) DC-X management team,
even though funded via ARPA, at least under the current House version of the
FY '94 Defense Authorization Bill.

The House of Representatives now seems favorably disposed toward SX-2.  The
biggest hurdle ahead this year will probably be convincing the Senate to go
along when the House-Senate conference committees meet to work out the
differences between the two versions of next year's Defense budget.

 ** This is the section of the House Defense Authorization Bill approved at
 ** the start of August that covers DC-X (SSRT) Followon.

Section 217, Single Stage Rocket Technology

(a) Program Funding -- the Secretary of Defense shall establish a Single
Stage Rocket Technology program and shall provide funds for that program
within funds available for the Advanced Research Projects Agency.  That
program shall be managed within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense
for Acquisition.

(b) Funding -- Of the amount appropriated pursuant to section 201 for
Defense-wide activities, $79,880,000 shall be available for, and may be
obligated only for, Single Stage Rocket Technology.

 ** This is the section of the report accompanying the House Defense
 ** Authorization Bill that covers DC-X Followon.  The report language is
 ** intended to clarify the intent of the bill.

 From The House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services
 Report on the FY '94 Defense Department  Authorization Bill, H.R. 2401
 H. Rpt. 103-200, 103rd Congress, 3rd Session; July 30th, 1993, pp. 172-173

Single Stage Rocket Technology

The budget request included $4.88 million for single stage rocket technology
(SSRT), also known as single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO), within the Ballistic
Missile Defense Office (BMDO) follow-on technologies program to complete the
final testing in phase one of the program.

The United States spends over $30 billion each year on space programs.  Yet,
unlike many other commercial activities that have benefitted and achieved
greater efficiencies from military research and development, U.S. commercial
launch costs are at least twice -- and in some instances as much as ten times
-- the costs of foreign competitors.  Similarly, it takes the United States at
least four times as long to provide launch services to any given user.

The Congress must remain skeptical and avoid fully embracing the sometimes
overly optimistic claims regarding SSRT/SSTO technology.  Yet, if the United
States is to regain its international competitiveness in this critically
important military and economic area, it must pursue promising enabling space
launch technologies that have the potential of dramatic reductions in launch
costs.

Accordingly, the committee recommends the following:

(1) Transitioning SSRT/SSTO from BMDO to a "Space Launch Technology" program
element within the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

(2) Continuing with the current management team.

(3) Adding an additional $75 million to begin phase two of the program.

(4) Conducting an open competition among aerospace companies for phase two of
the program.

(5) Examining options for DOD, other government agencies/departments, and
industry cost sharing opportunities.

None of the additional funds recommended to be authorized may be obligated
until the congressional defense committees have been provided with a phase
two program plan outlining objectives and technical milestones and certifying
that funding support has been established for fiscal years 1995 and 1996.

 ** End of report excerpt


 Henry Vanderbilt              "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere
 Executive Director,                in the Solar System."
 Space Access Society                              - Robert A. Heinlein
 [e-mail]                    "You can't get there from here."
 602 431-9283 voice/fax                                 - Anonymous


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