Where are America's spaceplanes?

In 1976, nearly a half-century ago, America celebrated its bicentennial anniversary—two hundred years as a free society. As America nears the quarter-millennia anniversary in 2026, we will be looking back to see how we are stacking up with where Americans in 1976 thought America would be in 2076.

The U.S. Air Force is a combat force. In various forms, the U.S. Air Force has been flying combat missions since 1916.

Airman magazine is the official magazine of the U.S. Air Force. On the July 1976 cover, shown above, a notional U.S. Aerospace Force combat spaceplane—the "S-17"—was shown performing space combat operations in the year 2076. The "S" designation for spaceplane was and remains the official aircraft-type letter code for spaceplanes. Yet, there are no military spaceplanes. Why is that?

Space became a military battlespace in 1944 when Germany launched V-2 tactical ballistic rockets to attack Allied forces in France, Belgium, and England. In only six months, over 3,000 V-2 were launched—1100 against England.

Conventional Allied airpower and ground anti-aircraft firepower proved ineffective in stopping these attacks. The Allied air forces tried hard through search-and-destroy tactical airpower missions to find the highly mobile launchers. Had the Allies had an anti-ballistic missile system comparable to the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, space would have become a battlespace during World War II just as it now has become above the Middle East.

Within a decade of the end of World War II, the U.S. Air Force began to research military spaceplanes, building on the efforts undertaken in Germany during the war. In 1957, the U.S. Air Force established a System Program Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton Ohio, to begin the acquisition of a military spaceplane. The effort was called "DynaSoar".

Even though the DynaSoar program was abruptly cancelled in 1963—by the then new President Johnson just months after President Kennedy's death—the cover of Airman magazine in 1976 shows that the Air Force still had a strong interest in developing military spaceplanes, even as NASA was then undertaking the development of the Space Shuttle.

Fifty years later, why doesn't America have any spaceplanes—military or commercial?

The Air Force thought it could develop a first-generation spaceplane system 60 years ago! NASA ended its spaceplane—the Space Shuttle orbiter—without replacing it with a better spaceplane capability. Why was that allowed to happen? Since the National Aerospace Plane program ended in the early 1990s and the X-33 program was cancelled, why hasn't America successfully undertaken a true spaceplane development effort?

Discussing important national space policy issues, such as the development of spaceplanes, is why the Spacefaring Institute LLC will begin publishing the LinkedIn newsletter, Spaceward.

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