Flight Testing
Construction of the DC-X started in 1991 at McDonnell Douglas' Huntington Beach facility. The aeroshell was custom-constructed by Scaled Composites, but the majority of the spacecraft was built from "off the shelf" parts, including the engines and flight control systems.
The DC-X first flew, for 59 seconds, on 18 August 1993. It flew two more flights 11 September and 30 September, when funding ran out as a side effect of the winding down of the SDIO program. Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad was at the ground-based controls for some flights.
Further funding was provided by NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency however, and the test program restarted on 20 June 1994 with a 136 second flight. The next flight, 27 June 1994, suffered an inflight (minor) explosion, but the craft successfully executed an abort and autoland. Testing restarted after this damage was fixed, and three more flights were carried out on 16 May 1995, 12 June, and 7 July. On the last flight a hard landing cracked the aeroshell. By this point funding for the program had already been cut, as a side effect of the winding down of the SDIO program, and there were no funds for the needed repairs.
Read more about this topic: McDonnell Douglas DC-X
Famous quotes containing the words flight and/or testing:
“Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)