For Release: March 5, 1999

Jim Cast
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/358-1779)

Dom Amatore
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL
(Phone: 256/544-0031)

Fred Brown
Dryden Flight Research Center, CA
(Phone: 661/258-2663)

Ellen Bendell
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Calif.
(Phone: 661/572-4155)


NOTE TO EDITORS: 99-039

NASA and Lockheed Martin's X-33 Advance Technology Demonstrator reaches a major milestone today as its Flight Operations Center is dedicated at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

NASA and Lockheed Martin officials will accept the facility from industry team member Sverdrup Corp., St. Louis, at a 1 p.m. PST ceremony. The 30-acre center, from which the X-33 will launch, is located 40 miles northeast of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Palmdale, Calif., where the X-33 is currently being assembled. Sverdrup designed and constructed the $32 million flight operations center in record time - just over 12 months -- and under budget.

The unique facility was built as a small-scale version of a future "spaceport," and is dramatically different from present launch sites. "We've created a flight center that supports the program philosophy of building a reusable launch vehicle that operates more like an airplane," said Gene Austin, NASA X-33 Program Manager. "The center is designed to allow us to service and launch the X-33 all from one spot, with a ground crew of fewer than 50 people.

"The facility will support our goal of demonstrating aircraft-like turnaround times," Austin added. "We plan two seven-day turnarounds and one two-day turnaround during our X-33 flight tests, which begin next year."

The X-33 is a half-scale, suborbital technology demonstrator of a reusable launch vehicle Lockheed Martin calls the "VentureStarTM." The $1.2 billion program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., is demonstrating advanced technologies that will dramatically increase launch vehicle reliability and lower the cost of putting a pound of payload into space from $10,000 to $1,000.

The X-33 is scheduled to conduct flight tests beginning in mid-2000. It eventually will fly faster than 13 times the speed of sound and at an altitude of 60 miles to prove its technologies and systems.

Note to editors: A Lockheed Martin fact sheet on the X-33 Flight Operations Center follows this release. Also, new X-33 flight animation, launch site construction b-roll and digital still photos are available to members of the media.