Grounded NASA Space Plane Poised for rejoinder

A decade after they were unceremoniously sideline, two experimental NASA space planes could be on the cusp of a staged comeback. Last week, NASA contractor moved the two, 59-foot-long X-34s from open storage to a examination pilot school in California’s Mojave Desert. There, workers from Orbital Sciences, the X-34’s innovative builder, will inspect the two robotic rocketships with an eye to flying them again. If the X-34s have detained up since their 2001 parking, they could help boost America’s tiny-but-growing arsenal of super-fast, economical, reusable spacecraft.

The X-34 program was a product of a mid-1990s space plane craze that aimed to decrease the number of rocket stages wanted to get into orbit. Over approximately a decade, NASA and the Air Force experimented with a number of single step vehicles. Some of those programs hit insuperable technical obstacles. Others confirm too expensive. By the early 2000s, nearly all of them had gone defunct. After spending $200 million, NASA shut down the X-34 program before the first flight, quote “technical risk” mostly associated to the craft’s engines. Moreover, the space agency had lost faith in the entire idea of cheap, single-stage spaceflight.

Then, in 2004, famed aviation designer Burt Rutan and aerospace firm Scaled merged launched their rubber fueled Space Ship One rocketship into near orbit, snagging a $10-million prize and show that low-cost space access actually was possible. That seemed to revive government space-plane efforts. Embattled tech reformer Franz Gayl got busy arguing on behalf of a plan to build space transport for the Marine Corps. The Air Force silently readied its mysterious X-37B “mini-Space Shuttle,” which today prowls orbit on secret errands. Now NASA could get back into the space plane game in short order, give the X-34s are still flyable.

Chances for Sky watchers to mark Private Rocket Are Slim

With the recent successful start of a new private rocket, called Falcon 9, and a space capsule mock-up from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Station, some sky watchers might be wondering if it will be consistently visible from the ground like many other bright artificial satellite. That resolve comes from some of the die-hard satellite observers, who just last month were able to locate and then track the U.S. Air Force's secret X-37B space plane.

Observers from about the world have since been able to get views of the X-37B as it moved across the twilight sky with the brightness of a moderately bright star. That vehicle is orbiting approximately 250 statute miles above Earth, inclined 40 degrees to the Earth's equator.But catching a sight of the Falcon 9 rocket, which launched Friday from Florida, is more difficult, in part due to a much lower orbital altitude of 155 statute miles, as well as a lower orbital inclination of 34.5 degrees. These two factors limit visibility to a much smaller area.

However, the Falcon 9 rocket built by the California-based company Space Exploration Technologies may have had one last hurrah following its successful maiden start last week. Before fading into the background of space, the rocket likely was answerable for a short-lived – but dazzling – spiral of light seen over parts of Australia that spawned a flurry of UFO reports, according to Australian news reports.