A List Of Top Ten Scrapped Spaceships

Discovery Space provides interesting Top 10 List of Scrapped Spaceships. Favorite designs are the Wernher Von Braun Ferry Rocket, Project Orion, an atomic spaceship, Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar and the Lockheed X-33 Venture Star. In "Almost Famous: The X-20 DynaSoar," The Living Moon article reveals: "The semi-winged DynaSoar evolved greatly. The basic idea was to lob the bird into low Earth orbit and skip across the upper atmosphere like a rock across a pond, a concept then known as "dynamic soaring." Then some wag decided to shorten the term to "DynaSoar"-perhaps forgetting the fate that awaited the craft's prehistoric namesakes!...Then a proposal was developed that would have seen three stages in development-DynaSoar I, II, III, and finally the operational DynaSoar Manned Orbital Weapons System." The X-planes seem certainly direct ancestors of present X-37 Orbital Test Vehcile, history implies a weapons program and reason for strong protests from Russia and India concerning X-37 mission.


George Dyson, science historian, reviews Project Orion in a TED talk below. Freeman Dyson, George's father, worked on project to build 4,000 ton nuclear powered spaceship to travel to Saturn.