Rainwater has to shout to be heard. "Be-hind the blue curtain is something you're not supposed to see," he yells. Or hear, for that matter. The country croon-ing drowns out the conversations of people working on whatever is behind the curtain and disguises the sounds of tools that might be drilling, cutting, or grinding. We're in Boeing's secretive High Desert As-sembly Integration and Test facility, part of a comples known as the Phantom Works, in Palmdale, California. The facility is part of the where, historically, aerospace companies have worked on the projects that have made the United States the world leader in military and space technology. F-117 stealth fighters, B-2 stealth bombers, and space shuttle orbiters all sprang from Plant 42. Today, another technological push is taking place here. Lying on the unclassified side of this particular high bay is the partially assembled lower fuselage of a 28-foot-long experimental craft called the X-37. It is a technology demonstrator for a spacecraft that, launched on an expendable rocket, could eventually fly almost any of the missions of the bombers and orbiters that preceded it. At long last the Air Force would have the space-plane it has pursued since the late 1950s.
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