And the lifting body spacecraft prototype won't fly at all without funding from the civil space agency's FY2001 Space Launch Initiative. Stay tuned, because nobody seems to know. At least that's what everybody is saying.
Truth is, what everybody has known for months has finally become public knowledge.
And that is there is no way short of cancellation to keep SLI and X-33 apart, despite the disparity of their timetables. That disparity was glossed over Friday at the joint press conference acknowledging X-33's revamped fate. As it stands now, the SLI-derived competition would result in a 2005 decision by NASA to contract with at least 2 launch providers for human spaceflight missions. But the final shape of the system that evolves to replace the space shuttles is not yet clear, and won't be, can't be until X-33 finally does what its developers and advocates first proposed that summer day when Al Gore revealed a scale model of the spacecraft to the waiting world. Meanwhile, more shuttle upgrades are still needed and the expendables keep flying, with the first launch of a Delta IV EELV scheduled next year.