WASHINGTON The Pentagon’s growing interest in conducting military operations through space is prompting the Air Force and NASA to try to form a common development program for the next generation of reusable launch vehicles. But finding a way to combine the civil space and military requirements won’t be easy.

WASHINGTON NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe tempered his call for closer cooperation between the civilian space agency and the U.S. Defense Dept. last week, after U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) cautioned him to maintain the “firewall” between military and civil space activities.

NEW YORK Between the growing glut of parked aircraft, airlines’ precarious finances and passenger traffic that remains extremely weak, it may take commercial aerospace up to five years to fully recover from the current U.S. recession and the punishing aftereffects of terrorist attacks last September.

DALLAS NASA/Langley Research Center is preparing to test the X-43ALS and X-43BLS platforms to determine how hypersonic shapes respond when encountering ground effect during the takeoff and landing phase of flight. Although proposed hypersonic aircraft would spend much of their flight time at speeds up to Mach 8-10, “you have to take these aircraft off the ground and go subsonic, transonic and supersonic, and we are looking at vehicles that replicate these hypersonic shapes to determine how they perform in the low-speed regime,” said Robert Pegg.