Partnerships for Innovation: The X-33/VentureStar

Abstract

In 1996, NASA officials entered into a cooperative agreement with the Lockheed Martin Aerospace Company to build a privately owned successor to the agency’s 15-year-old space shuttle. NASA officials agreed to provide Lockheed Martin with 81% of the funds necessary to develop a flyable X-33 technology demonstrator. The company would contribute the rest. In turn, corporate executives indicated that they would use the X-33 to raise private capital for a larger VentureStar spacecraft that could fly cargo and people to low-Earth orbit and back. The effort did not succeed; NASA abandoned the program in 2001 before the X-33 could fly. This chapter recounts the events that led NASA to enter into a cooperative agreement to produce a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, and the lessons that people in the space community learned from this early attempt to construct such a spacecraft using a public/private partnership. (Howard E. McCurdy)