"I think the X-33 will never fly, and I'm not alone in that opinion."
That quote last September from Tim Kyger, a former congressional staffer who now works for a satellite tracking service, proved prophetic Thursday as NASA decided to scrap its $1.2 billion experimental Reusable Launch Vehicle program that was intended to be the successor to the space shuttle.
Kyger was certainly closer to the mark than program manager Gene Austin, who said the same month: "We think that we're probably looking at about a two-year delay from this year to 2002."
NASA spent $912 million on what was supposed to be a lower-cost alternative to the aging space shuttle. Like the shuttle, it would be a reusable spacecraft that would ferry astronauts and cargo into space.
Designer Lockheed Martin Corp. spent $357 million on the doomed project. Another, smaller program, called the X-34, designed by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., will also be shut down.
"This has been a very tough decision, but we think it is the right business decision," said Art Stephenson, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in a prepared statement issued Thursday.
The X-33 had a dual Utah connection. Last July, the space plane was scheduled for its first suborbital test flight from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to a landing strip at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah's western desert. That never happened.
The other local connection was with Alliant Techsystems in Magna, which was paid $66 million from early 1996 to early 1999 to build two liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks at its Clearfield plant that were intended to propel the X-33 into space.
The X-33 was to make its first test flight in the spring of 1999, but prior to the launch, one of Alliant's two 28-foot-long, 4,700-pound composite tanks ruptured during a static test, leading NASA and Lockheed to contemplate switching to aluminum tanks.
But the program was running out of money and, plagued by other engineering problems, it never recovered.
Alliant spokesman David Nicponski said Friday that Alliant would have no comment on NASA's decision to kill the X-33 project and declined to speculate on how critical the fuel tank failure was to the project.
"We made some fuel tanks. It was a one-shot deal. We're not impacted by it in any way. We've been out of it for almost two years," Nicponski told the Deseret News Friday.
The tanks built by Alliant were not just fuel carriers but also the vehicle's major fuselage structure. Alliant had the difficult task of creating tanks that were extremely durable and stiff to function in their structural role while also maintaining their seal as a fuel tank.
Mark Messick, X-33 program manager for the project, said in an interview with the Deseret News in April 1999 that the tanks were a major challenge.
"We really have pushed the state of the art in building a large tank structure that will contain liquid hydrogen while being the main structural element of the X-33," Messick said. "We've done something that nobody has done before."
Messick's comments also proved prophetic. Seven months later one of the tanks failed, the project was delayed and Thursday's announcement marked the end of the X-33 story.
Contributing: The Associated Press, Reuters
E-MAIL: max@desnews.com