NEW MEXICO A RIVAL FOR X-34 TESTING; ASSISTED FLIGHTS SLATED OUT OF EDWARDS SOON.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

A prototype test version of a rocket plane caught in a tug of war between California and New Mexico lawmakers is scheduled to make its first flight next week under a modified L-1011 jetliner.

Locked to the belly of the Lockheed jetliner, the nonflying X-34 vehicle will make seven or eight flights out of Edwards Air Force Base, starting Tuesday morning, to prove to the Federal Aviation Administration the L-1011 can safely carry the craft.

``All of the modifications to the L-1011 have been completed and checked out,'' Seunghee Lee, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center's X-34 project manager, said in an announcement released by Dryden. ``The L-1011 and X-34 interface instrumentation system has been calibrated. Everything is ready to go.''

The first actual flight X-34, vehicle A2, is undergoing checks of its systems in Virginia and should be delivered to the flight test program in July. The third vehicle should be delivered in 2000.

The FAA certification tests will be done at Edwards Air Force Base. However, the question of where the initial flight tests of the X-34 will be conducted still is unresolved.

Officials at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico have told NASA that conducting X-34 flight tests at the Air Force's White Sands range could interfere with Air Force training missions.

New Mexico's congressional delegation, with many fans of the program, is trying to keep the rocket plane in its state. And the California delegation has responded, sending a letter to the Pentagon in support of conducting the flight tests at Edwards.

At the Air Force's request, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is studying safety and environmental issues connected with testing in New Mexico, but has reached no conclusions, NASA spokesman Jim Cast said in Washington, D.C.

``NASA is still in the wings and kind of in limbo,'' he said.

About the size of an F-15 fighter jet and designed to reach 5,600 mph at the edge of space, the X-34 is intended to demonstrate that reusable spacecraft using a smaller operations team can be more reliable, fly more often and in worse conditions that current rockets, NASA officials said.

Like the famous X-15 rocket planes of the 1950s and 1960s, the X-34 would be carried aloft beneath a larger airplane, then released and its rocket engine ignited.

Unlike the X-15, the X-34 will have no pilot. It will fly under control of its onboard computers.

The X-34 program has three main goals: demonstrate new and efficient methods of preparing a spacecraft for flight, evaluate new technologies aimed at lowering the cost of getting into space, and show the craft can serve as a host for future experiments.

During the flight test program, NASA wants to achieve a mission turnaround time of less than two weeks while using a ground crew of fewer than 24 people. Space shuttles take months between flights.