JSC Is Letting a X-38 Rot In The Rain
Keith’s note: JSC used to be so proud of its X-38 program. Not any more. The X-38 V-201 orbital test vehicle is currently sitting atop its ground mobility carrier outside at JSC behind Building 49. It is totally exposed to the elements and sitting next to a trash dumpster. You can even see it in Google Maps. Click on images to enlarge.
C’mon JSC. How much would it cost someone to go to Home Depot at lunch time to buy one of those blue tarps everyone in Houston uses on their roofs after a hurricane? Why not donate this X-38 to Space Center Houston if you can’t think of anything better to do with it than to park it outside next to a dumpster?
JSC got all upset about not getting a Space Shuttle and yet this is how they treat a spacecraft they built all by themselves?
– JSC Is Abandoning NASA History, earlier post
– More History To Be Destroyed in Huntsville, earlier post
– The Continued Rotting of Skylab, earlier post
– X-38 Put in Storage at Johnson Space Center, earlier post
An odd irony- the Shuttlecraft Galileo 7 mock-up used in Star trek in the 60’s was left out to rot- then had to be restored a few years back.
Now I’m pretty sure it’s on display in Houston’s Space Center.
Just so we’re clear here-
A Full Size (actually it was built slightly under scale) AMT built model of a fictional ship, that can’t fly or do… anything – is deemed more important by some folks in Houston than an actual ship that was proving tech to rescue a full complement of station astronauts.
Let’s celebrate the fictional things we might do 2-300 years from now rather than what we didn’t- but should have – done some 15 years ago
God help us if one of the Soyuz capsules has a problem at the same time the station has an emergency. Maybe they can send up that Trek shuttle mock-up that Houston’s museum is preserving so well.
This is an embarrassment.
It’s the policy makers, the bean counters that should end up in the dumpster.
Will anything change? Nope. No one will take a lesson here- Better to 1/2 build another project that will get canceled.
I’m looking at you Ares/SLS
I get why the X-38 is near the dumpster. No one wants a reminder of old spending considered to have gone bad to get in the way of the new fresh pork.
The two atmospheric flight test units are on display, one at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Nebraska, and the other at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in Oregon.
I agree that the spaceframe for the orbital test vehicle should be better protected. I wonder if a tarp is simply in a backlog of the procurement train somewhere.
Since I live in the area, I’ll note that the Evergreen Aviation Museum’s future is not looking too good right now. http://www.kgw.com/story/mo…
It sounds in the article like the company that owns the museum isn’t doing well, but the museum itself is doing all right. “Visitor count at both the Museum and Waterpark is strong, and the Museum is profitable. We will continue to operate as usual.”
So whoever acquires the museum from Evergreen Aviation International will at least know that asset is profitable.
I’ve been there a couple of times and it’s a GREAT museum.
Fair enough. I feel a little better now. Perhaps Keith can update this article with your info, as I’d felt on reading this that the whole program was being shuttled around in disgrace- I also thought that the orbital test vehicle program was further along than just this space frame. Thanks for the clarification(s).
I’m keeping an eye on this …
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The YB-70 Valkyrie (the surviving on of the two built) must have spent twenty years on the tarmac outside the Air Force museum at Wright-Patterson. They eventually got money to upgrade the museum and, among other things, take it in out of the rain.
The USAF Museum is currently moving aircraft from the old Experimental and Presidential hangars (on the base) to their brand new 4th hangar which is attached to the Museum. This will both improve access and permit more aircraft to be stored inside. The new hangar will be open to the public next year.
Any idea how long it has been there?
You mean the X-38? I would imagine it would be some time after the Bush team cancelled it in 2002. So lets assume someone gave a damn and kept in in a hanger or covered (for a while) So… ~10 years in the elements? Maybe it will be soon be damaged enough that some congressperson will see that it’s worth a line item (jobs!) to fix it back up. (I am facetious- old waste is always hidden – funny that this waste is in plain sight)
Heck- I’m still wondering where all the X-33 pieces went. So many concepts in there that kinda worked in the end. Shame it wouldn’t have worked as a system. Those tiles and engines though,,, each seemed advanced (lost, suppose). Sigh, I think they’d even licked the composite/lobed tank issue in the end.
I’m pretty sure, if I’m remembering correctly, that the frame of the X-33 was disassembled. If that’s not the case, then it’s shoved in a corner somewhere in one of LM’s storage yards.
The metallic TPS was an interesting idea but it requires a lower level of reentry heat, so it would only work for large surface areas that generate high drag, like the Venture Star would have been. It wouldn’t work on a capsule, as that has less drag and so undergoes higher temperatures during reentry. Ultimately it has limited application.
Aerospike engines have never really stopped going through testing. There are a number of universities and other groups that are working on them, mostly toroidal aerospike engines. I think the furthest along is Firefly Space Systems, who is going to use a plug-cluster toroidal aerospike engine on the stages of its small-sat launcher. In that design there are a ring of ten small rocket engines each with its engine bell basically cut in half, set around a central plug that acts as an aerospike. It’s an interesting way to achieve the aerospike effect.
As I recall, I asked this here some time ago and was told a large number of X-33 pieces live / lived on. The XRS-2200 Linear Aerospike engine was put in storage. Research continued on the metallic thermal protection tiles but was filed away somewhere. The frame was completely disassembled.
You know after X-33 was canceled and the decision was made to keep flying the shuttle (at that point, they were looking to past 2020), I always wondered if the Metallic TPS could be retrofitted to the Shuttle.
Hopefully the XRS-2200 is looked at again down the road.
As mentioned upthread, the Titanium TPS needs lower peak temperatures than ceramic/composite ones. IIRC, they looked at metallic TPS for STS, but the heat loads were too high without active cooling.
Another cancelled ISS piece – the CAM – found its home in Tsukuba space center, as a museum exhibit. Not a central piece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Yep, also outside, by the looks of the picture.
At NASA I was Payload Accommodations Manager for the Centrifuge Facility and Centrifuge Accommodations Module. In fact – I named the module. So I can imagine how bummed the X-38 folks feel to see their stuff sitting outside under a shredded tarp.
Trying to parse actual day to day duties from the title, Keith: does this mean you figured out where all the stuff goes inside the thing?
Hey, NASA only spent over a billion dollars on the project. It was cancelled. Lets just forget about the whole thing.
I really don’t understand NASA. They spend a billion dollars and are working on a flight test article, the project gets cancelled and they can’t find a few thousand dollars to shrink wrap the flight test article and ship it to a forgotten corner of Davis-Monthan? That’s preserving organizational knowledge?
The blue tarps only last for a short while (6 months, a year?) before the sun and weather cause them to break apart.
The pics clearly show the remains of a silver tarp that has succumbed to the elements.
Right. That already happened to what they put over it years ago. A trip to Home Depot every few years seems to be beyond JSC’s capabilities.
I’m sure no middle-manager at JSC wants that tarp to come out if *their* budget.
I wonder how many engineering hours went into the design and review of that trailer, excuse me, ground mobility carrier, only to have the get parked next to a dumpster, draped in tarp shards and the temporary orange construction fencing.
I think its fair to say that many of the people who worked X-38 have now left NASA after seeing so much of their work trashed. I know a few who went off to work on SNC’s Dream Chaser only to see NASA terminate its support. I doubt too many think too highly of what has become of the program or its management. Maybe there is a place where some of these abandoned relics could be displayed as examples of colossal wastes of taxpayer dollars?
will it fit inside the tunnel they dug for the superconducting supercollider?
I don’t see it on that sat view. I see the re-striped parking spaces where it sits in the photo, but those parking slots are empty in the sat image and there isn’t anything that big parked in that area.
It’s been outside for a long time. I saw it outside in 2009 and tried getting it for the Air and Space museum in Tulsa, OK, but was told it was going to Seattle. Guess it never made it.