>>12119940Nope. X-33's development program showed us that.
For Venture Star to work, it needed to have tanks lighter than what were possible to construct out of AL-Li alloy. Designers had therefore chosen carbon fiber composites as their tank construction material because of the mass reductions that were possible given a naive estimate. While trying to actually construct those tanks however it was realized that rather than offering the breakthrough in mass reduction required for Venture Star to achieve the minimum mass ratio necessary to achieve orbit, the CFC tanks were actually heavier than what could be built using AL-Li, because of the complex joinery and reinforcements required. Note that this doesn't mean that the AL-Li tanks could have done the job; They would still be too heavy, it's simply that the CFC tanks turned out to be even WORSE. A total failure in design.
Another glaring problem staring down the Venture Star was the fact that its main engines were fantastical. The Venture Star's main engines were, on paper, amazing; they would have had very high thrust AND thrust to mass ratio for a hydrolox engine, as well as being very highly efficient, in fact the most efficient chemical rocket engine to ever fire at sea level (apart from a few experimental, highly impractical tri-propellant test engines). The reality however was ugly; the X-33's main engine, which again was meant to extoll the advantages of an aerospike engine, was actually overweight, underperforming, and not very efficient. Once again, it turned out after all that development, that the old tech (the RS-25 engine with a partially-vacuum-optimized nozzle) would have probably out performed the real version of the magic ideal aerospike engine that Venture Star required (though, like the Al-Li tanks, still would not have been good enough).
Literally the only technology of worth to come from the entire Venture Star/X-33 program were the metallic TPS tile advancements. They didn't upgrade Shuttle.
