AAWSAP DIRD, Space Access: Where We’ve Been and Where We Could Go, March 2010

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responsibility for space access, that Air Force's focus switched to
surveillance, communication, and Global Positioning System
satellites.
In the late 1950s, there existed a predisposition-forced by the
military competition between the United States and the former
Soviet Union-to use rockets derived from military ballistic missiles.
That decision curtailed efforts to develop alternatives to chemical
rockets together with practical commercial developments. With the
orbiting of Sputnik, the aircraft path to space, as represented by the
X series of planes, ended with the X-15. With the X-15's demise, all
efforts to fly aircraft to space ended, replaced by the more familiar
(but less practical) strategy of loudly blasting to space with
expendable rockets derived from undertested ballistic missile
hardware, as documented in early failures.
Like their ballistic missile progenitors, current expendable rockets
can be launched only once. With the exception of the experimental
Delta Clipper developed and operated by William Gaubatz and the
late Pete Conrad, no operational launcher has ever successfully
aborted. In this context, a reusable launcher is simply an
expendable with some parts reused a few times. Thus, neither the
United States nor the Soviet Union/Russia has ever realized a truly
commercial approach to space travel, although the Soviets came
close to taking the first step with the since-terminated
Energia/Buran system. Both the United States and the Soviet
Union/Russia historically have generated a large number of concepts
that could fly directly to space and return on a sustained, frequent,
scheduled basis. An all-up air breather such as the NASP was to
solve that problem and fly directly to space and return. Developing
an operational mach 12 to 14 aircraft with air-breathing propulsion
presents a serious design, engineering, and fabrication challenge
analogous to the SR-71 Blackbird.
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