Will The Delta Clipper Scuttle The Shuttle?

In 1990, the Pentagon's Star Wars program called for a radically new rocket that would do what no other spacecraft had done: climb into orbit in one piece, without dropping off booster rockets on the way up--and without a human pilot on board. It would be the space equivalent of an airliner--reusable and therefore cheaper to operate.

Skeptics at NASA insisted that any rocket big enough to hold all the fuel required would be too heavy to reach orbit. But aerospace companies crunched the numbers and decided a so-called single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rocket had become technically feasible. McDonnell Douglas Corp. won the contest to build a suborbital vehicle to test the concept. Today, its rocket--the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X--is one of three contenders being evaluated by NASA as a potential successor to the space shuttle. A decision should come on July 1.