Up, up, and away: Do you have what it takes to make a space-worthy plane?

A plane that operates efficiently in the air and in space is the current dream of the U.S. Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Some of the dream sequences include: flying from New York to Australia in thirty minutes, Tokyo in two hours; reducing the expense of transporting material into space to one tenth the current estimated cost; and the ability to quickly service military space systems. For the U.S. armed forces, particularly the United States Air Force (USAF), this second generation aerospace plane is rapidly becoming a “must have” item. The necessity of having this type of versatile aircraft stems primarily from USAF studies done in 1985 whose findings concluded that a more responsive, less expensive aircraft was needed to complement growing military space activities.