A secretive military spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle orbiter is undergoing final processing in Florida for launch on April 19.

The Air Force confirmed the critical preflight milestone in a response to written questions on Thursday.

The 29-foot-long, 15-foot-wide Orbital Test Vehicle arrived in Cape Canaveral, Fla., last month according to the Air Force. The OTV spaceplane was built at a Boeing Phantom Works facility in Southern California.

Managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, the OTV program is shrouded in secrecy, but military officials occasionally release information on the the spaceplane's progress.

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Here are photos from my visit last week.

The open source flight simulator project has just released Flightgear 2.0.

...FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

It looks great and the price is right so check it out!

FlightGear Web Siite

NASA EBook Site

Gizmodo has the scoop on a new aircraft deployed in Afghanistan possibly a variant of the Lockheed P175 Polecat.

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The odd story of NASA’s unused wingless escape vehicle for the International Space Station is finally over.

The prototype X-38, a 7-person, unpowered, totally automatic lifeboat, was officially laid to rest at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Ashland, Nebraska last weekend.

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X-15 Hypersonic Research Program

In the joint X-15 hypersonic research program that NASA conducted with the Air Force, the Navy, and North American Aviation, Inc., the aircraft flew over a period of nearly 10 years and set the world's unofficial speed and altitude records of 4,520 mph (Mach 6.7) and 354,200 feet in a program to investigate all aspects of piloted hypersonic flight. Information gained from the highly successful X-15 program contributed to the development of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo piloted spaceflight programs as well as the Space Shuttle program.

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X-15 Photos

Here photos from my recent visit.

Photos of the YF-23 Black Widow post restoration at the USAF Museum.

Photos of the YF-23 Black Widow during restoration at the USAF Museum.

From Wikpedia

The Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender (Curtiss-Wright CW-24), was a 1940s United States prototype fighter aircraft built by Curtiss. Along with the XP-54 and XP-56, it resulted from United States Army Air Corps proposal R-40C issued on 27 November 1939 calling for unconventional aircraft designs. A highly unusual design for its time, it had a canard configuration, a rear mounted engine, swept wings and two vertical tails. Because of its pusher design, it was sarcastically referred to as the "Ass-ender." Like the XP-54, the Ascender was initially designed for the Pratt & Whitney X-1800 engine and had to be redesigned when that engine project was cancelled. It would also be the first Curtiss fighter aircraft to use tricycle landing gear.

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On Displey

During Restoration