SPACESHIP MODEL PASSES FLIGHT TEST.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

An experimental aircraft designed to test technologies for a future space station ``lifeboat'' performed flawlessly in its first flight Thursday over an Edwards bombing range.

Using a steerable, rectangular parachute called a parasail, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's automated, pilotless X-38 glided for about eight minutes after being dropped from a modified B-52 at 23,000 feet, finally landing on its skids on the bombing range.

``We had done everything we could to minimize the unknowns,'' said John Muratore, X-38 project manager. ``But the real proof of the concept is a successful flight. We got one of those today, and we plan to do this about 20 more times over the next two years to prove we're ready to fly from space.''

The X-38 is intended to pave the way for the building of an ``emergency crew-return vehicle,'' a spacecraft that would be docked to the international space station as a lifeboat. The vehicle would fly back into Earth's atmosphere like the space shuttle, but land using its parafoil.

The return vehicles, like the X-38, would be unpiloted. They would fly to a designated landing site by using an automated flight-control system reading signals from a global-positioning satellite network.

NASA plans to flight-test three X-38s. The first X-38 had its flight-control surfaces in fixed positions and was steered only with the parafoil.

The second X-38 will have a flight-control system for extended maneuvers. The third X-38 will have ``space-qualified'' systems on board.

The drop tests will increase to an altitude of 50,000 feet and will include longer flight times for the test craft before the deployment of the parafoil.

In 2000, an unpiloted test vehicle will be deployed from the space shuttle and descend to Earth.

The fiberglass shells of the X-38 were fabricated in Mojave by Voyager designer Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites Inc. The instrumentation was installed by NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The test originally was scheduled to end on Rogers Dry Lake, but most of the lake bed is still covered with water from El Nino-related rainstorms.

The X-38 ended its flight on Edwards' Precision Impact Range Area, coming to a halt within 30 yards of an access road.

The same modified B-52 bomber that carried the X-15 rocket planes in the 1960s was used for the test.

The X-38 is based on a design concept called a ``lifting body,'' a design NASA engineers refer to as a ``flying bathtub.'' NASA Dryden Flight Research Center flew a series of the blunt-nose, wingless aircraft from 1963 to 1975.

The actual space station lifeboat will be 28.5 feet long - about 20 percent larger than the X-38. The six-person crew-return vehicle would be small enough to fit inside the space shuttle's cargo bay - which is one way it might be brought up to the space station.

NASA officials hope to build four operational spacecraft for $500 million, which would include the cost of the X-38 prototypes. NASA expects the crew-return vehicles to be ready for use by 2003.

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PHOTO (Color in AV Edition only) (Ran in SAC and AV Edition only) The X-38 spacecraft, shown in a file photo, passed its first flight test with flying colors Thursday at Edwards Air Force Base. The vehicle is being used to test technologies for a space station ``lifeboat.''