Martin Marietta Spacemaster
Concept Led By: NASA/Lockheed Martin
Companies Involved: Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin
It is unlikely most people today have heard of Martin Marietta, but you may recognize another name. They merged with a little company called Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin. Before this, the Martin Marietta company came out of a previous merger with the Glenn L. Martin Company and American-Marietta Corporation back in 1961. Before the Lockheed merger, Martin Marietta had an idea for spacecraft. The Spacemaster used an X-24-derived orbiter and a weird catamaran-style booster stage. Both during the launch and ascent, the orbiter would be located in a recess in the booster. The booster’s 14 different engines would be located in clusters of seven, at the bottom of both halves of the booster.
It lacked any external tank and boosters were joined together, mostly via the connection of struts which also served as the mounting for the orbiter. This initial Spacemaster design just could not work for NASA in 1967, but most of it seemed to fit and would go on to be the core of the Space Shuttle used for decades from 1981 to the 2010s. The biggest difference between the Space Shuttle and Spacemaster was the external tank, which Martin Marietta developed by the late 1970s. The final STS Space Shuttle design also used unjoined boosters. Those boosters were developed in a joint venture by Boeing and Rockwell International. This newer Space Shuttle lasted from the mid-1990s to 2011, after this point the Space Shuttle was retired. Today, you can see the original Spacemaster at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.