Lowering the cost of traveling into space is a goal of companies including Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and the US Air Force. But DARPA is also interested in solving the problem by developing a reusable spaceplane design. That spaceplane is called the Experimental Spaceplane XS-1, and Boeing just won the contract to build it.
DARPA's reasons for exploring a reusable spaceplane have been made very clear. The combination of smaller budgets and "proliferating foreign threats to U.S. air and space assets" mean cheap and easy access to space is "essential to enabling new military space capabilities and rapid reconstitution of space systems during crisis."
The XS-1 is meant to be a solution to that problem. It's a spaceplane that's easy and cheap to fabricate, capable of carrying a payload weighing up to 3,000 pounds, and costing no more than $5 million per launch. It takes off vertically like a rocket without any external boosters and lands horizontally like an aircraft.
DARPA selected Boeing's Phantom Express design with which to move forward and develop a final XS-1 spaceplane. It will be about the same size as a business jet, is fully autonomous, and powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine using liquid oxygen and hydrogen as fuel. During a mission the XS-1 will fly to the edge of space, deploy a second stage, and then return to Earth.
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Boeing won after Phase 1 of the XS-1 project. Now it must undertake Phase 2 and 3, which cover fabrication of a usable spaceplane and successful flight of that craft. Phase 2 will end in 2019 and requires the completed XS-1 engine firing on the ground 10 times in 10 days. Phase 3 is scheduled to end in 2020, at which time up to 15 test flights will have been carried out including 10 flights in 10 consecutive days. The final flight will see a 3,000 pound payload delivered into a low Earth orbit. During these flights the XS-1 will travel at speeds of up to Mach 5.
One side effect of the XS-1 project is its potential impact on the rest of the industry. DARPA intends to share "selected data" from Phase 2 and 3 of the tests with any commercial entities that are interested. It could lead to a revolution in how flight is approached from a design and cost perspective.