Airpork; the National Aero-Space plane is too fast to live, too hyped to die.

• Author: Gray, Peter

A week after the Challenger exploded in 1986, Ronald Reagan introduced the country to the hydrogen-powered National Aero-Space Plane (NASP), "a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours." The same plane, or a close relative, would deliver bombs from Montana to Moscow in one hour; it would make regular freight deliveries into space from the runways of America.

By November 1989, after the Bush administration managed to renew funding for the project, William Safire had caught the fever, waxing rhapsodic in The New York Times over the way "the Underestimated Man," Dan Quayle, chairman of the National Space Council, "got down there in that hydrogen slush and rescued the spaceplane from oblivion." This "4,000 mile-an-hour NASP," Safire explained, "will zip past the French-British Concorde the way a souped-up Corvette passes an antique tin lizzie." It will be "a made-in-America aircraft capable of taking off from any major airport, zooming out into space and reentering the atmosphere to land at any other airport in less than three hours."

Sounds pretty neat. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that these claims don't add up. You just have to get down in that hydrogen slush, ignore Dan Quayle, and apply a little common sense.

Take the "any-major-airport" line. Among scores of articles in everything from Aviation Week to The New York Times, I have yet to find one that questions this crucial selling point. But a little curiosity would quickly lead you to two aviation rules of thumb: 1) fast airplanes aren't much good at flying slow; and 2) minimum runway length increases in proportion to the square of takeoff and landing speed-two times the speed, four times the runway. This should set off a mental alarm-after all, we're talking about flying up to 30 times faster than a normal airliner. In mid 1989, Aviation Week & Space Technology put NASP takeoff speed at 450 mph. Well, the Concorde supersonic transport lifts off at 220 mph, and the two-and-a-quarter mile Dulles airport runway is its minimum. The "spaceplane" would need at least nine miles of concrete. No airport on the planet could accommodate it. Maybe we could find enough cheap real estate to build nine-mile runways-but not near New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And it's not likely that the neighbors, who have already demanded quieter aircraft, will put up with the infernal racket of the noisiest one ever built; the Concorde is more than loud enough.

Then there's the matter of heat: air friction would raise the surface temperature of this plane above that found inside a blast furnace; and the matter of cost: a little figuring shows that one flight on the Orient Express would wipe out most people's life savings. You get the idea. Orient excess

Problem is, Congress doesn't. We've already spent more than a billion dollars on the NASP, and the meter is starting to run faster: Congress plans to spend $305 million on this funding pipeline dream next year, up from this year's $258 million. Given enough time and money, engineers might eventually overcome the major obstacles and build some sort of spaceplane. But the briefest consideration reveals that the contractors' claims for how long that will take (four years), how much it will cost ($10 billion), and what the plane's spinoffs will do (everything) are absurd. And while we throw money at the spaceplane, more useful, if less sexy, projects-like slow, unmanned, super-high-altitude research planes that would track changes in the environment-go begging.

The spaceplane program is flourishing not on its merits but because of skillful contractor packaging-a slick sales job that combines geographic placement of plants for maximum pork-barrel effect with seeming openness toward journalists, who, like Safire, tend to rewrite press releases instead of rethinking premises when it comes to big science projects. This uncritical acceptance of the contractors' claims is a sin few congressmen or journalists would commit if the expensive new program were, say, a welfare initiative or a tax proposal. But our watchdogs in Congress and the press always slip up a bit when the hydrogen slush begins to flow.

By 1989, some members of the consortium of contractors working on the spaceplane had begun backing away from Reagan's hype of the commercial aviation spin-offs. In Aviation Week, James B. Fyfe, deputy NASP program manager for Pratt & Whitney, said, "The idea that it's an Orient Express-a rich man's toy-is very damaging to the program."

But Reagan got his ideas somewhere, and this one didn't come from a mystery movie. As the prominent contractor in the consortium during the late eighties, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (or MACDAC, in the biz) cranked out a series of full-page magazine ads, brochures, and official-looking reports about its proposed "X-30" experimental plane-"forerunner of the Orient Express."

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