I'm just back from a two-week road trip, so this will be brief. I had a couple spare hours before catching my flight west this afternoon, so I dropped by the Longworth House Office Building just in time to hear about the final results of the DOD Appropriations conference RE SSTO funding.
It looks like very good news. We seem to have gotten what we need to get started on a joint NASA/DOD high-speed X-rocket this year. Given how bad things looked as recently as Friday, this is wonderful. (Friday's reports were in fact accurate, but they were snapshots of an interim stage in the process. Things obviously improved in the final product.)
This does not mean we're home free, but it does now give us a heck of a lot of leverage in A: seeing that one or more X-rockets are actually built in a timely fashion, and B: seeing that we get the right sort of X-rocket, the sort that can lead to radically cheaper space transports.
A side note: I hear "X-32" is taken; this will likely be the "X-33". One wonders just what an X-32 might be... More on what happened and what all this might mean in the next few days.
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who worked for this win.
Henry Vanderbilt hvanderbilt@bix.com
Executive Director, Space Access Society
[Congressional Record, 9/26/94, page H9612 -- FY'95 DOD Appropriations Bill language]
[final conference version of SSTO funding amendment. This effectively transfers the remaining $35 million of held-up ARPA money from last year to USAF Phillips Lab via NASA.]
...(b) Of the funds provided in the Department of Defense Appropriation Act, 1994 (Public Law 103-139), The Secretary of Defense shall transfer a total of $60,000,000 to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): Provided, That of that amount, $25,000,000 shall be transferred from Procurement, Defense-Wide, 1994/1996, and shall only be used for LANDSAT 7: Provided further, that of that amount, $35,000,000 shall be transferred from Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, [RDT&E - ed.] Defense-Wide, 1994/1995, and shall only be used for Single- Stage-to-Orbit research and development at Phillips Laboratory, Alburquerque, New Mexico and, pursuant to the President's call for a supporting role for DOD in this technology, the funds shall be used in activities to support NASA-led construction of an Advanced Technology Deomonstrator X-vehicle and to finish the original flight test program of the DC-X1 test vehicle.
[Page H9648, report language referring to a budget line item in the list of Air Force RDT&E items on pages H9645/6, $30 million for "Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology". This goes directly to the DC-X/SX-2 people at USAF Phillips Lab, if as seems likely 0603401F is the same as the PE 63401F we've been pushing for.]
The conferees agree:
... (f) that the $30,000,000 provided for reusable space launch vehicle technology should be included in program element 0603401F;...
*30*