Virgin Galactic terminal building in the New Mexico desert

The first thing you notice about the Mojave Air & Space Port is the large number of commercial airliners just sitting around under the desert sun. The climate here means it’s the perfect place for aircraft manufacturers to store planes whose owners haven’t managed to finish paying for them. If the spectre of this aviation elephants’ graveyard wasn’t strange enough, five miles to the west is the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm – the second-biggest in the world, with more than 5,000 wind turbines.

It’s a weird landscape; and it seems to inspire off-the-wall businesses, and the one-of-a-kind thinkers who run them. One of these businesses is called, with the kind of obviousness that seems redolent of a gentler age, the Spaceship Company – and in its workshop at the airfield, spaceships are being built.If that conjures up images of stick-drawing lunar modules or sleek, Wernher von Braun rockets tower-block high, think again: this spaceship is made of carbon fibre, powered by recycled nylon and laughing gas, and turns into a shuttlecock so it can flutter straight down to Earth. And instead of sitting on a launch pad in Florida it’s dropped from an aircraft built around the biggest piece of carbon fibre composite in history.And both are designed by a company whose founder lives in a half-buried pyramid in the middle of the desert decorated with murals of aliens communing with ancient Egyptians. This is the astonishing backdrop to what promises to be the first venture to take paying passengers into space.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic isn’t the only company taking the business of space tourism seriously. But it’s further along with its preparations than its competitors, with its Sir Norman Foster-designed Spaceport America due to be completed next year in New Mexico, and its spaceship three months into its flight-test programme.Virgin Galactic is very close to realising the dream of making travel to the edge of space available to ordinary people – and those customers with £140,000 to spare are going to double the number of the world’s astronaut corps almost overnight. ‘New Mexico passed the legislation in March to allow for informed consent of participants,’ stresses Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic’s MD. As of now, under U.S. law these people are participating in this space programme. They’re astronauts – it’s a legal reality. There’s been just over 500 people in space since 1961 – we hope to carry 500 in our first year.’

To get numbers like this, Virgin Galactic needs a small fleet of spacecraft and the aircraft that carry them to 50,000ft for launch. The plan is for the Spaceship Company – a joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Mojave-based aerospace firm Scaled Composites – to build three launch aircraft and five spaceships, as Virgin Galactic works towards taking fare-paying ‘participants’ into sub-orbit space from 2012, and progress towards its goal of three daily spaceflights.

As the comprehensive flight-test programme gets under way, the first job of the test pilots is to ensure that the spaceship and mothership can fly safely, efficiently and as intended when joined together, and its these flights – known as ‘captive carry’ flights, because the smaller SpaceShipTwo craft will remain attached to the WhiteKnightTwo aeroplane – that are currently taking place from the Mojave Air & Space Port. Yet even as they fly the aircraft, the pilots are learning all the time about how to operate the spaceship as well. WhiteKnightTwo’s twin pods are the same size and shape as the tubular fuselage of SpaceShipTwo, their six-passenger interiors are identical, and the mothership and spaceship work on exactly the same control systems. So every time a test pilot flies the mothership, he’s getting experience controlling the spacecraft as well.

Unusually for a modern aircraft, computers do not control any of the onboard flight systems: there are computers, but they’re used solely for monitoring and informational purposes.Instead, both mothership and spacecraft are operated using traditional stick-and-rudder mechanical aircraft systems. The experience for the pilot is ‘like flying a Cessna into space,’ Whitehorn says. Even the mechanism that changes the angle of SpaceShipTwo’s wings – enabling it to adopt a fanned-out shuttlecock shape when plummeting back into Earth’s atmosphere – is manual, with a lever that operates a hydraulic system. This is an attempt to ensure that all the systems used will be as simple, and therefore as safe, as possible.

This thinking extends to the rocket propulsion system as well. The fuel used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon was a highly combustible mixture of liquid nitrogen and kerosene-based aviation fuel; the astronauts were effectively sitting on top of a skyscraper-sized bomb. Clearly a system designed to carry passengers cannot be that volatile, so new technologies have informed the search for an engine that can boost SpaceShipTwo to its maximum speed of about 3,500mph.

The spacecraft will be fitted with a plug-in rocket booster, which can be removed after touchdown and a new fuel plug inserted to power the next flight. The fuel chosen isn’t some high-explosive compound: in fact, it sounds about as explosive as a wet salad. SpaceShipTwo will be powered by one of two solid fuels – rubber or recycled nylon.

‘The oxidiser (which combines with the fuel to produce thrust) is nitrous oxide – laughing gas,’ says Whitehorn. ‘And unlike other solid fuel engines this one can be switched off, by cutting the flow of nitrous oxide.’So it’s very reliable, and very, very safe.’ And it’s this rocket propulsion system that means the whole Virgin Galactic enterprise is shrouded in mystery. Cockpit or interior photos are unavailable because, as the system relies on rocket technology, the whole project is treated under U.S. law as if it was a weapon.

‘Every single picture that exists has to be vetted before it’s released,’ Whitehorn explains. ‘We won’t be allowed to release any detailed pictures of the interior until this thing goes commercial.’ Even for the experts at Scaled, the Virgin Galactic project has required them to go beyond what they’ve worked on before. Aside from the particular demands of a spaceship, the construction of WhiteKnightTwo has taken composite aircraft design up a level.

Essentially the airborne equivalent of a catamaran, the twin-hulled aircraft has to be immensely strong. To ensure there are no joints – creating potential weaknesses – Scaled had to create what Whitehorn says is ‘the largest single piece of composite ever built’, which runs along and inside the 140ft wingspan. This onepiece backbone means WhiteKnightTwo is, according to Whitehorn, ‘the strongest aircraft in human history.

‘There’s immense strength in the middle of the wing, which allows this vehicle to lift 17 tons to an altitude of 50,000ft. Then, when it drops the spaceship, WhiteKnightTwo becomes a zero-G flying machine – an astronaut training vehicle – and the people in the left hull, who are flying into space the next day, can do their final training in it. WhiteKnightTwo will turn on its side (with one wing pointing straight up and the other down to Earth), and fly in circles, so it becomes a flying centrifuge, generating seven times the force of gravity.’

if   you want to find out where such revolutionary thinking comes from, you only have to drive for ten minutes from the Mojave airfield. On a dirt road beside a mailbox fashioned from the tail section of an old aircraft, there’s a half-buried house shaped like a six-sided pyramid sticking out of the desert sand. On one of its subterranean walls – so it’s said – there’s a mural showing aliens helping ancient Egyptians to build the monuments of Giza. And it’s in this house that the story of the Virgin Galactic enterprise really begins.

The home belongs to Burt Rutan, the pioneering aviation designer behind the Voyager aircraft, which flew around the world on a single tank of fuel in 1986. Rutan runs Scaled Composites, and he has produced some of the most ingenious designs in aviation. Although he’s told at least one interviewer he is convinced aliens helped build the pyramids, his single-minded way of looking at design problems has helped his company progress in areas the big aerospace corporations have had trouble getting their heads around – such as space tourism. In 2004, Rutan and Scaled, with funding from Microsoft’s Paul Allen, won the Ansari X Prize – a $10 million fund awarded to the first team that managed to put a man in low Earth orbit twice within a fortnight. Scaled’s design was called SpaceShipOne: a rocket launched at above-airliner altitude from a mothership.

Meanwhile, the other prime mover in the Virgin Galactic story was making his way to Mojave via Morocco. Richard Branson was an early convert to the idea of space tourism: Whitehorn, a long-time Virgin Group staffer, says discussions took place between the British mogul and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the Eighties that would have seen Branson journey into space on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Then one night in 1996, in a bar in Marrakesh, ahead of the launch of one of his round-the-world balloon trips, Branson and balloon pilot Steve Fossett fell into conversation with Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.’Richard asked why they never launched rockets into space from balloons – wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper?’ recalls Whitehorn, who was present.

‘Buzz then explained that the U.S. Navy had experimented with balloon-launched rocket capsules in the Fifties, but that it had been abandoned in the Sixties; and there was a programme called the X-15, which was a rocket launched from a B-52 bomber. End of story, until the next day, when Richard said to me, “We should keep an eye on these ideas.”‘ Three years later, Whitehorn was in Mojave, looking at a bizarre rocket/helicopter hybrid. ‘There was no way that was going to work,’ Whitehorn says. ‘But in the process, Richard went to Mojave to look at it, and while he was there he met Burt.’

Rutan’s first collaboration with Branson was the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer – effectively a development of Rutan’s Voyager aircraft.’We’d just invested in the railway business, where you could go out and tell the companies what you wanted and they’d build a train for you on spec; but in the airline industry you had to take what you were given,’ says Whitehorn. ‘So Richard got very interested in composites, and then Steve Fossett suggested building a very fuel-efficient high-altitude jet that could go around the world in three days.’

Astronomers find loads of water-ice on big asteroid

A slushy cocktail of water-ice and organic materials has been directly detected on the surface of an asteroid for the first time. The finding strengthens the theory that asteroids delivered the ingredients for Earth’s oceans and life, and could make astronomers rethink conventional models for how the Solar System evolved.

It has long been thought that asteroids, which lie in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, are rocky bodies that sit too close to the Sun to retain ice. By contrast, comets, which form further out beyond Neptune, are ice-rich bodies that develop distinctive tails of vaporized gas and dust when they approach the Sun. However, this distinction was blurred in 2006 by the discovery of small objects with comet-like tails in the asteroid belt1, says astronomer Andrew Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.To investigate the composition of these ‘main-belt comets’, Rivkin and his colleague Joshua Emery, of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, turned the infra-red telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, onto the asteroid 24 Themis — the parent body from which two of the smaller comet-like asteroids observed in 2006 were chipped. Emery and Rivkin took seven measurements of 24 Themis over a period of six years, each time looking at a different face of the asteroid as it travelled around its orbit. They consistently found a band in the absorption spectrum of light reflected from its surface that indicated the presence of grains coated in water ice, as well as the signature of carbon-to-hydrogen chemical bonds — as found in organic materials. Rivkin and Emery’s work is published in this week’s Nature2.

“Astronomers have looked at dozens of asteroids with this technique, but this is the first time we’ve seen ice on the surface and organics,” says Rivkin. The result was independently confirmed by a team led by Humberto Campins at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He and his colleagues observed 24 Themis for 7 hours one night, as it almost fully rotated on its axis. “Between us, we have seen the asteroid from almost every angle and we see global coverage,” says Campins. He and his team also publish their findings in this week’s Nature3.

Julie Castillo-Rogez, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, describes the findings as “huge”. “This answers the long-term question of whether there is free water in the asteroid belt,” she says.
Icy interloper

Because 24 Themis lies only about 479 million kilometres from the Sun (roughly three times the mean distance from Earth to the Sun), it is surprising that the surface ice has not all been vaporized. Both teams speculate that more ice may be held in a reservoir beneath the asteroid’s surface, shielded from the Sun, and that this ice is slowly churned up as the asteroid is struck by small bodies in the belt, thus replenishing the surface ice.The findings lend weight to the idea that asteroids and comets are the source of Earth’s water and organic material. Geochemists think that the early Earth went through a molten phase when any organic molecules would have dissociated, so new organic material would have had to be delivered to the planet at a later time, says Campins. “I believe our findings are linked to the origin of life on Earth,” he says.To assess the plausibility of this scenario, astronomers must determine whether the make-up of 24 Themis is typical of other asteroids and, if so, what exactly they hold, says Castillo-Rogez. A priority should be to search for water ice on near-Earth asteroids that could be targeted by NASA’s planned robotic and manned missions. “If we find ice samples that contain the same ratio of deuterium [‘heavy hydrogen’ made up of one neutron and one proton] to hydrogen as seen on Earth, that would be a strong pointer,” she says.

However, 24 Themis may not be a typical member of the belt it could be an interloper that formed beyond Neptune, along with the comets, which was later knocked inwards, says Rivkin. If so, this would fit well with the controversial ‘Nice model’ of the evolution of the Solar System. Proposed in 2005, this model suggests that the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and asteroids migrated to their present orbits after formation4. Either way, says Rivkin, “The old-fashioned picture of the Solar System in which asteroids are asteroids and comets are comets is getting harder to sustain.”(nature)

GOP ends Dems' longtime advantage on economy amid anxiety over jobs, recession

WASHINGTON  Notch one more victim of the recession: With crucial midterm elections nearing, Democrats have lost the advantage they’ve held for years as the party the public trusts to steer the economy.The timing could be fortunate for the Republicans. With jobs and the economy dominating voters’ concerns, the GOP will wield the issue as a cudgel in the battle to grab control of at least one chamber of Congress this November and weaken President Barack Obama.”The number one question on voters’ minds is, ‘Where are the jobs?'” said Ken Spain, spokesman for the House Republican campaign organization. “Republican candidates on the campaign trail will ask one very simple question: ‘Are you better off today that you were two years ago?'”

Misty McMahon, 30, a teacher from Vancleave, Miss., knows her answer. “I feel like it’s so bad right now that it will be hard to climb out,” said McMahon, who voted for Obama but now trusts Republicans more on the economy. “I’m kind of disappointed in the stuff he’s done.”

Each party now has the confidence of 44 percent of people for handling the economy, according to an Associated Press-GfK Poll conducted this month. The Democrats had a nine-point advantage just four months ago, and have held an edge since AP polls began asking about the issue in 2006. In longer-running polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, the last time the two parties were even on the economy was 2002.

Pollsters, analysts and politicians across party lines agree the Democrats have lost their grip on the issue chiefly due to unemployment rates that have stuck near 10 percent since last summer, an ongoing foreclosure crisis and the recession that began in December 2007. Despite signals the economy has begun to heal – such as last week’s reports of growing new home sales and rising orders for manufactured products – the improvements have been too subtle for many people to notice.While the November elections are a long way off, most economists believe unemployment will still be high by Election Day, and improvements in the economy are likely to be modest.

Aware that the party in power is commonly punished for a weak economy, Democrats hope to persuade voters to view the elections as a choice between their party’s recovery efforts and what they call the GOP’s preferences to reward corporations and wealthy taxpayers.

“It will be the job of members of Congress and the president and our candidates to make it clear that these elections are not just a referendum on the state of the economy; it will be a choice between two different paths,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who heads the House Democratic campaign operation.The Democrats also may have hurt their image as effective custodians of the economy by spending more than a year pushing Obama’s near $1 trillion health care overhaul through Congress. It was enacted last month to mixed public reviews and after many people – including Democrats – complained that stronger congressional efforts on jobs were overdue.

“It created the impression that Democrats were not focusing enough on jobs and getting people back to work,” said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster and strategist, adding, “But health care is now behind us.”Some of Obama’s top economic initiatives have also failed to deliver political dividends because, economists say, they have largely prevented the recession from worsening rather than sparking immediate improvements.

As a result, many people have come to view those measures as symbols of excessive federal spending. They include the $787 billion stimulus package and the $80 billion rescue of automakers General Motors and Chrysler, to which the public often adds the $700 billion financial industry bailout enacted in late 2008 under President George W. Bush.

“Politically, it’s often hard to show a negative, a what-if-we-hadn’t-stepped-in,” said Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster and strategist.

Details from the AP-GfK poll show perils and opportunities for both parties.Three-quarters of those surveyed said the economy is still in poor condition. Of that group, fewer than four in 10 said they trust Democrats to do a better job on the economy, and about the same number said they want Democrats to win control of Congress in November.In contrast, among the people who say the economy is doing well, two-thirds trust Democrats to handle the issue and nearly as many want them to control Congress.Supporters of a party in power tend to view the economy more positively than members of the party out of power.

Two other groups in the poll could be pivotal in November.Among people who say the economy is bad, those who believe things improved in the past month are far likelier to support Democrats than those who’ve not seen recent gains. Growth in optimism could help Democrats retain their congressional majorities.

On the other hand, nearly two-thirds in the poll say they know a non-relative who has recently lost a job. This group, whose size has remained steady for more than a year, is likelier to back Republicans.

“That’s the circle that becomes problematic for any incumbent administration,” said GOP pollster David Winston.The AP-GfK Poll was conducted April 7-12 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media and involved interviews with 1,001 adults nationwide on landline and cellular telephones. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.(AP)

blizzard warnings were expected to expire early Thursday. Some areas in New York, Maryland and Washington

Blizzard warnings in some areas, such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, expired late Wednesday. And other blizzard warnings were expected to expire early Thursday. Some areas in New York, Maryland and Washington, already buried under layers of snow, might still see light snow Thursday, the National Weather Service said.

Officials were still deciding early Thursday whether to open Dulles International Airport and Reagan Washington National airports, after they were shut down Wednesday.Amtrak was still providing limited service for Washington, New York and Boston, Massachusetts, on Thursday, but most passenger rail service south of Washington was canceled.

The New York subway system was expected to run normally Thursday, compared with the limited service at the height of the blizzard, transit officials said.This winter is already the snowiest on record for Washington and its suburbs, as well as Baltimore, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware, the National Weather Service said. And it’s on track to set records in other cities, including Philadelphia and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The 55 inches of snow that have accumulated in the nation’s capital during the past two storms proved too much for some buildings. Snow was blamed for the collapse of at least 22 roofs in Washington.In central Pennsylvania, Interstate 80 near Clearfield was shutdown after two pileups — one involving 17 cars and the other involving seven cars, said Rich Kirkpatrick of the state’s Department of Transportation.One person died and another person was seriously injured, police said.

difficult situation for Democrats in Congress is worsening as the 2010

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

WASHINGTON An already difficult situation for Democrats in Congress is worsening as the 2010 political season opens.To minimize expected losses in next fall’s election, President Barack Obama’s party is testing a line of attack that resurrects George W. Bush as a boogeyman and castigates Republicans as cozy with Wall Street.Four House Democrats from swing districts have recently chosen not to seek re-election, bringing to 11 the number of retirements that could leave Democratic-held seats vulnerable to Republicans. More Democratic retirements are expected.

Over the holiday break, another Democrat, freshman Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama, defected to the GOP. “I can no longer align myself with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy, and drives us further and further into debt,” said Griffith, who voted against Democrats’ three biggest initiatives in 2009: health care, financial regulation and reducing global warming.

In the Senate, at least four Democrats – including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and five-term Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd – are in serious trouble. The party could also lose its grip on seats Obama held in Illinois and Vice President Joe Biden long occupied in Delaware.

Going into 2010, Democrats held a 257-178 majority in the House and an effective 60-40 majority in the Senate, including two independents who align themselves with Democrats.But they face an incumbent-hostile electorate worried about a 10 percent unemployment rate, weary of wars and angry at politicians of all stripes. Many independents who backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008 have turned away. Republicans, meanwhile, are energized and united in opposing Obama’s policies.

The one thing that heartens Democrats is that voters also don’t think much of the GOP, which is bleeding backers, lacking a leader and facing a conservative revolt.House Democrats began an ad campaign in December assailing Republicans for opposing legislation restructuring federal financial rules and recalling the final days of the Bush presidency, when the economy tanked.

“Remember? We all know we should never let this happen again,” the ad says. It lays into Republicans for voting “to let Wall Street continue the same risky practices that crippled retirement accounts and left taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion.”Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who heads the House Democrats’ campaign arm, said his party wants to remind voters who was on their side at a difficult time. “The Republican Party in Washington today is no different than the Republican Party that ran the Congress before,” he said.

But that was three years ago. Democrats have been in control since, and Bush is long gone. This is Obama’s country now. Democrats tried to use Bush against Republican Chris Christie in the New Jersey governor’s race in November – and Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine still lost.A top Democratic priority is minimizing losses among nearly four dozen seats the party now holds in moderate-to-conservative districts that Republican John McCain won in the 2008 presidential race. The most vulnerable in that group include Democratic Reps. Mary Jo Kilroy in Ohio, Harry Teague in New Mexico, Frank Kratovil in Maryland, Tom Perriello in Virginia and Travis Childers in Mississippi.

Reps. Bart Gordon and John Tanner, both of Tennessee, were in that group until they chose to retire. So was Griffith, before he switched to the GOP. Retirement announcements from Reps. Dennis Moore of Kansas and Brian Baird of Washington put two more Democratic seats in swing-voting districts on the GOP’s target list.

Democrats insist that Gordon, Tanner, Moore and Baird are leaving for personal reasons and are not the first ripple in a wave of retirements akin to 1994 when 28 Democrats chose not to run, and Republicans won control in part by winning 22 of those seats.”Democrats are beginning to see the writing on the wall, and instead of choosing to fight in a difficult political environment, they are taking a pass and opting for retirement,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the House GOP’s campaign arm.

The GOP will be defending at least a dozen open seats because of retirements, with several lawmakers leaving the House to run for higher office.The situation for Democrats in the Senate is nearly as grim as it is for them in the House.Democrats crowed after six Senate Republicans – four from swing states Florida, Ohio, Missouri and New Hampshire and two from GOP-leaning Kansas and Kentucky – announced retirements.

Spirited GOP challenges are now expected in all six states, and Republicans say they are optimistic they can retain the seats. An emboldened GOP also is looking to put a pair of senior Senate Democrats out of office.Reid, who is seeking a fifth term, is faring poorly in surveys in a hypothetical matchup with Nevada GOP chairwoman Sue Lowden, one of several Republicans competing for a chance to challenge him.

Dodd, the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee chairman who has taken heat for a discounted VIP mortgage loan he got from a subprime lender, has been consistently behind potential GOP challenger Rob Simmons in Connecticut polls. Simmons, a former House member, has his own challenger in World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon, who also is seeking the Republican nomination for Dodd’s seat.

Also vulnerable are Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a moderate Democrat in GOP-leaning Arkansas, and Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado, who was appointed when Ken Salazar became Obama’s interior secretary.

Republicans have high hopes for picking up Senate seats in Illinois and Delaware that were held by the president and vice president, respectively. Neither of their appointed successors is seeking election to the seats.

Early polling shows GOP Rep. Mark Kirk leading among Republican candidates in Illinois. Veteran GOP Rep. Mike Castle, a former two-term governor, is running for the Senate in Delaware. Biden’s son, Democratic state Attorney General Beau Biden, is considering whether to challenge Castle. (AP)

Boeing X-37 The USAF's Secret Spaceplane

It’s been a long wait—in some ways, more than 50 years—but in April 2010, the U.S. Air Force is scheduled to launch an Atlas V booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the newest U.S. spacecraft, the unmanned X-37, to orbit. The X-37 embodies the Air Force’s desire for an operational space-plane, a wish that dates to the 1950s, the era of the rocket-powered X-15 and X-20. In other ways, though, the X-37 will be picking up where another U.S. space-plane, NASA’s space shuttle, leaves off.

With a wingspan of 15 feet and a length of 27.5 feet, the X-37 looks like a tiny space shuttle. It has a blunt (though windowless) nose, and one rocket engine bell instead of the shuttle’s three. Two cargo doors open just as the shuttle’s do, revealing a four- by seven-foot bay. Like the shuttle, the X-37 was designed for low Earth orbits—in the latter’s case, altitudes of 125 to 575 miles. And the craft will fly like a shuttle, reentering the atmosphere with the orbiter’s 40-degree nose-high attitude. After reentry, it will change to a 20-degree nose-down glide and, flying at up to 220 mph, land at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with Edwards Air Force Base as an alternate.

But as for the period between launch and landing, no one, save for a select few in the Department of Defense, knows exactly what the little Boeing-built space-plane will do, or for how long. The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which is running the program, says only that the orbital test version, the X-37B, will take a suite of next-generation technologies to orbit and will break new ground in the realm of launch, recovery, and reuse, all with an unmanned twist that the shuttle never offered.

At a 2008 Space Foundation breakfast in Washington, D.C., Gary Payton, deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, recalled the X-37’s origins. Payton started the program while at NASA. “Then, the X-37 was intended to be a testbed for new technologies that could retrofit into the shuttle: predominantly guidance, navigation, and control, and [thermal protection system] technologies,” he said. In that era, planners imagined the shuttle carrying the X-37 to space in its cargo bay and releasing it.

Now, with the shuttle’s retirement looming, it appears the X-37 will have an independent, post-shuttle life. Payton envisioned such a role for the X-37, saying: “It would be really advantageous in my mind if we had a system you could launch, recover, change out the payload bay quickly, and put into a different orbit, and do all that measured in weeks instead of decades.” David Hamilton, director of the Rapid Capabilities Office, says in an e-mail: “Eventually, I see the unique possibility to operate X-37B more like an aircraft and explore the needs of responsive, reusable spacecraft.” Unlike a satellite, he points out, the space-plane returns, enabling “detailed inspection and significantly better learning than can be achieved with [a satellite’s] remote telemetry alone. Experiments can be modified and re-flown, with the objective of shortening the technology maturation time line.”

“The space shuttle was designed to be a very heavy payload lifter, and it has performed that job extremely well,” says Mark Lewis, a University of Maryland hypersonic expert who recently completed a four-year appointment as chief scientist for the Air Force. “But you don’t need to send a Mack truck into space when a Toyota Celica will do.”The question is: Will do what? Lewis, whose enthusiastic speech barely keeps pace with his mind, is happy to talk about the skin-deep similarities between the shuttle and the X-37. (“A lot of the basic reentry physics is treated the same way,” he says. “Blunt configurations. The shuttle has very blunt leading edges.”) But when he’s asked about anything more than the X-37’s aerodynamics, he clams up.

So does everyone else. “While some aspects of the…program have been designated as unclassified and been released to the public; information regarding specific technical and performance capabilities will not be released at this time,” writes David Hamilton. “Hide it in plain view,” says one observer of the Air Force’s practice of letting out just a little about the X-37, enough to make it seem like it will never be more than a research tool.

Hamilton does say that “once declared operational, the X-37B could have applications to support missions such as space situational awareness; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; on-orbit servicing and repair; and satellite deployment and/or retrieval.”

It’s possible the space-plane could have a role in national security, particularly since China, India, Japan, and even Iran have begun to exploit space. In December 2007, photographs of an unmanned, classified Chinese space-plane, the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” began to appear on Chinese Web sites. Though hitched to the underside of a bomber, rather than perched atop an expendable booster, the mysterious Shenlong has a blunt nose and single rocket engine bell, making its appearance strikingly similar to the X-37’s.

The U.S. program started out relatively open to view, a research effort jointly shaped by the Air Force, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Boeing. The Air Force ordered the first prototype, the X-40A, from Boeing in 1996. When it came time to produce the next iteration, the X-37A drop-test vehicle, NASA had the company increase the size by about 20 percent.

But since then, the X-37 has taken a winding and perplexing path among NASA, DARPA, and the Air Force. From 2004 to 2006, DARPA oversaw it. Along the way, both the X-40A and the X-37A have been drop-tested (first over New Mexico in 1998 and California in 2006, respectively), which proved their automated approach and landing abilities. Finally the program was taken over by the Air Force. Today, call up any of these organizations and say “X-37” and it’s like spraying a garden hose at housecats.