Dyna-Soar (X-20)

The Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar (“Dynamic Soarer”) was a United States Air Force (USAF) program to develop a spaceplane that could be used for a variety of military missions, including aerial reconnaissance, bombing, space rescue, satellite maintenance, and as a space interceptor to sabotage enemy satellites. The program ran from October 24, 1957, to December 10, 1963, cost US$660 million ($5.58 billion in current dollars), and was cancelled just after spacecraft construction had begun.

Other spacecraft under development at the time, such as Mercury or Vostok, were space capsules with ballistic re-entry profiles that ended in a landing under a parachute. Dyna-Soar was more like an aircraft. It could travel to distant targets at the speed of an intercontinental ballistic missile, was designed to glide to Earth like an aircraft under control of a pilot, and could land at an airfield. Dyna-Soar could also reach Earth orbit, like conventional, manned space capsules.

These characteristics made Dyna-Soar a far more advanced concept than other human spaceflight missions of the period. Research into a spaceplane was realized much later in other reusable spacecraft such as the 1981–2011 Space Shuttle and the more recent Boeing X-40 and X-37B spacecraft.