X-33 space plane

[Tom holds up a composite sample.] This is part of the X-33 space plane, a composite material that cost about $12,500 a pound. So when you're talking about material selection, you have to talk about what industry you're in. If you're in the automotive industry or the railroad industry, they're not interested in twelve-thousand-dollar-a-pound composite structural materials. If you're in the aerospace industry or the spacecraft industry, they're cost-insensitive — they're performance-based, and they will pay a pretty penny because they can save $20,000 a pound. Actually they don't really save the $20,000; they can get an extra pound of payload up in space for the same rocket booster. That's just to give you some examples.

Brief mention as the would-be reusable-shuttle successor that "had problems." Foreshadowed for later lectures.

The space shuttle in the late 1960s was supposed to lower the price of a payload into orbit from $10,000 a pound to $1,000 a pound. How successful was the space shuttle? Well, it upped the price to about $300,000 a pound, because it had a few problems — but that's another story. It didn't meet its goal. Then there was the X-33 space plane that was supposed to give us a reusable space shuttle, and it had problems too. We'll tell you some of those stories in some of these other lectures. But you have to decide which modules you want to take.

$12,000-per-pound composite hydrogen tanks, 8,000 lb total mass, $100 million total market — the limiting case for boutique-composite economics.

So one thing that gives material scientists a job is they get to try to figure out what the best material is. Composites are wonderful materials. I've shown you my $12,000-a-pound piece of the X-33 space plane. I've shown you this thing of the V-22 Osprey. They could not have built this without composites — graphite-epoxy composites. If they had made it out of something heavy like aluminum, they never could have gotten it to fly. It's the first large all-composite aircraft. They had made smaller little single- or two-person jets out of all composites, but the Osprey was the first one that was all composites.