Someone named Chris Bergin attempts to tell the disappointing true tale of the X-33/VentureStar – What really happened.
And gets a good bit of it right, surprisingly.
My favorite bit:
A five foot long tank was built and tested at NASA Lewis (now NASA Glenn), but the larger structure for the X-33 was going to be a step too far. Skunk Works’ designers of the LH2 tank had heard from engineers that storing liquid hydrogen in a pressurized composite (notably material IM7/997-2) tank with the hollow honeycomb walls was simply doomed to failure – but their advice was ignored.
Heh. I wonder who those engineers might have been…?
There’s still plenty of not-quite-accurate “official version” stuff here, though he does seem to have talked to some program insiders since he gets a few of the lesser-known aspects correct. Someday, someone will write the True Inside Account of the X-33 program — it’ll make for some amusing (and perhaps instructive) reading.