In the wake of the Columbia disaster, NASA officials say they're accelerating plans to develop a $12 billion Orbital Space Plane that would ferry astronauts to the International Space Station by 2012 at a lower cost than the space shuttle can.
Designed to function more like a minibus than the truck-like shuttle does, the lightweight space plane would carry mostly human cargo and rely on rockets and other technology that NASA has developed.
The space plane might not look like a traditional plane at all, but more like an earlier generation of capsulelike craft that were launched by expendable booster rockets in the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs.
"We've been told to implement the plan," Dennis Smith, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's program manager for the Orbital Space Plane, said yesterday.
"What we've been asking ourselves is if there is any way we can do anything to speed things up."
Smith briefed reporters on the space plane as investigators continued to study the disaster that killed seven astronauts when Columbia broke apart over Texas during re-entry Feb. 1.
Smith said the space plane would be no more than half the size of a shuttle, which has roughly the same dimensions as a DC-9 jetliner.
It also would cost far less to operate than the shuttle's $500 million per flight. NASA hopes the space plane would shave the cost of ferrying passengers to the station to $100 million per flight or less.
Smith said he expects a flying version of the space plane by 2010 and regular service two years later.
He also noted that the design specifications that NASA expects to release Tuesday might call for a capsule-shaped vehicle. Calling it a space plane "does not imply wings," he said.
A 27-foot-long, robotic concept prototype, the X-37, is scheduled for its first test flight in mid-2004.
The final version probably would ride into orbit on models of the Delta or Atlas rockets that NASA developed in the 1990s to launch communications satellites but shelved when the dot-com bust dried up the commercial space market.
NASA has ruled out building another shuttle to replace Columbia but plans to keep the three surviving shuttles, the Atlantis, the Discovery and the Endeavor, flying for another decade.
They are the only U.S. craft capable of carrying cargo into orbit and the only ones large enough to haul the equipment and building materials required to complete the $100 billion International Space Station, which has been in orbit since 1998.
