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The ultimate purpose of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle and details about the craft, which has been passed between several government agencies, however, remain a mystery as it is prepared for launch April 19 from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

“As long as you’re confused you’re in good shape,” said defense analyst John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. “I looked into this a couple of years ago — the entire sort of hypersonic, suborbital, scramjet nest of programs — of which there are upwards of a dozen. The more I studied it the less I understood it.”

The quietly scheduled launch culminates the project’s long and expensive journey from NASA to the Pentagon’s research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the X-37 program, but the current total has not been released.

The launch date, landing sites and a fact sheet were released by Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Angie I. Blair. She said more information would be released soon, but questions on cost and other matters submitted by e-mail weren’t answered by Friday.

While the massive space shuttles have been likened to cargo-hauling trucks, the X-37B is more like a sports car, with the equivalent trunk capacity.

Built by Boeing Co.’s Phantom Works, the 11,000-pound craft is 9 1/2 feet tall and just over 29 feet long, with a wingspan of less than 15 feet. It has two angled tail fins rather than a single vertical stabilizer.

Unlike the shuttle, it will be launched like a satellite, housed in a fairing atop an expendable Atlas V rocket, and deploy solar panels to provide electrical power in orbit.

The Air Force released only a general description of the mission objectives: testing of guidance, navigation, control, thermal protection and autonomous operation in orbit, re-entry and landing.

The mission’s length was not released but the Air Force said the X-37B can stay in orbit for 270 days. The primary landing site will be northwest of Los Angeles at coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The significance of the X-37B is unclear because the program has been around for so long, said Peter A. Wilson, a senior defense research analyst for the RAND Corp. who several years ago served as executive director of a congressional panel that evaluated national security space launch requirements.

“From my perspective it’s a little puzzling as to whether this is the beginning of a program or the end of one,” Wilson said Friday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

As NASA anticipated the end of the shuttle, the X-37B was viewed as a working prototype of the next-generation design of a fully reusable spacecraft, but the space agency lost interest and the Air Force picked it up, Wilson said.

“It’s viewed as a prototype of a vehicle that could carry small payloads into orbit, carry out a variety of military missions and then return to Earth,” he said.

The Air Force statement said the X-37 program is being used “to continue full-scale development” and orbital testing of a long-duration, reusable space vehicle.

Wilson sees the upcoming launch as “a one-shot deal.”

He acknowledged that he does not know if there is a classified portion of the program but said there is no evidence of a second vehicle being built to follow the prototype. In aerospace, a prototype typically remains a test vehicle used to prove and improve designs for successive operational vehicles.

To fully function as a completely reusable launch system there would also have to be development of a booster rocket that is capable of landing itself back on Earth to be reassembled with the spacecraft, according to Wilson, who does not see any support for such an initiative.

Wilson also said the usefulness of payloads such as small military satellites is in question, which would undercut the need for the launch system.

The X-37B is now under the direction of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office. Its mission is to speed up development of combat-support systems and weapons systems.

Operating since 2003, the office has worked on several things, including upgrading the air defenses around the nation’s capital as an anti-terrorism measure and assessing threats to U.S. combat operations, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

NASA began the X-37 program in 1999 in a cooperative deal with Boeing to roughly split the $173 million cost of developing an experimental space plane. The Air Force put in a small share.

The X-37, initially intended to be carried into space by shuttles in 2003, was a larger version of the Air Force X-40A, a concept for a “Space Maneuver Vehicle” to put small military satellites in orbit. The X-40A was dropped from a helicopter in glide and landing tests but was never capable of actual space flight.

In 2002, NASA awarded Boeing a $301 million contract to complete a version of the X-37 to be used in approach and landing tests and begin designing an orbital version that would fly in 2006.

But in 2004 NASA turned the project over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s research and development arm. In 2006, the X-37 was put through captive-carry and drop tests using Mojave-based Scaled Composite LLC’s White Knight, the jet that launched SpaceShipOne on the first private suborbital manned space flights.

America’s Army is a video game — a “tactical multiplayer first-person shooter” in gaming lingo — that was originally developed by the U.S. military to aid in its recruiting and training, but is now available for anyone to play. Among the most downloaded Internet games of all time, it is perhaps the best known of a vast array of video game-based military training programs and combat simulations whose scope and importance are rapidly changing not just the video-game marketplace, but also the way the U.S. military finds and trains its future warriors and even how the American public interfaces with the wars carried out in its name. For all the attention to the strategic debates of the post-9/11 era, a different sort of transformation has taken place over the last decade — largely escaping public scrutiny, at modest cost relative to the enormous sums spent elsewhere in the Pentagon budget, and with little planning but enormous consequences.

These “games” range from the deadly serious, like programs designed to train soldiers in cultural sensitivity or help veterans overcome the trauma of combat, to the truly outlandish, like a human-sized hamster wheel that makes virtual-reality software feel more realistic. There are even video-game modules that teach soldiers about the perils of sexual harassment. All told, the U.S. military is spending roughly $6 billion each year on its virtual side, embracing the view, as author Tom Chatfield put it, that “games are the 21st century’s most serious business.”

The numbers were far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could cope with. In the end only 162 out of 4,459 callers were given advice before the system was shut down.

Andreas Zimmer, head of the project in the Bishopric of Trier, admitted that he wasn’t prepared for “that kind of an onslaught.” The hotline is the Church’s attempt to win back trust in the face of an escalating abuse scandal that threates the papacy of German-born Pontiff Benedict XVI in Rome.

On the same day as the hotline was launched came allegations of serial abuse perperated against children by Bishop Walter Mixa – an ally and friend of the pope – when he was a priest overseeing a Catholic childrens’ home in the 70’s and 80’s.

The leader of Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops said in a Good Friday message he hoped Christianity’s most solemn day would mark a “new start” for a church buffeted by scandal.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Christ, must “mark a new departure which we so badly need.”

It comes in the wake of a wave of damaging allegations about cases of paedophile priests.

Pope Benedict XVI allegedly knew about one particularly disturbing paedophile case in the United States. The Rev. Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican many years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action.

The pope, however, made no mention of the scandal during his pre-Easter mass at the Vatican on Thursday.

An Austrian victim support group has received reports of 174 more cases of maltreatment and sexual abuse in Roman Catholic institutions since creating a hotline two weeks ago, the group said Friday.

The Platform for Victims of Violence by the Church set up the special number amid a spate of paedophile priest scandals in Europe and the United States which have engulfed the Vatican.

“We are learning daily about the methods of education in Catholic institutions in Austria during the 1960s and 1970s,” Holger Eich, a psychologist from the group, told a press conference alongside a victim.

The need for disclosure in the swap markets is enormous, yet the will to act is missing because of a small cadre of special interests, said Harold Bradley, who oversees almost $2 billion in assets as chief investment officer at Kauffman.

“There is no incentive from the moneyed interests in either Washington or New York to change it,” Bradley told the Reuters Global Exchanges and Trading Summit in New York.

“I believe we are in a cabal. There are five or six players only who are engaged and dominant in this marketplace and apparently they own the regulatory apparatus,” he said. “Everybody is afraid to regulate them.”

U.S. and European officials are trying to craft new rules to regulate the $450 trillion private derivatives market in broad efforts to avoid another financial crisis.

Policy-makers generally agree that most standardized derivatives should be traded on exchanges or cleared through a clearinghouse, which would assume the risk of a default.

Bradley said those efforts fall short. There needs to be a national market system for fixed income and credit with displayed prices and the posting of open interest and market positions, he said.

Siddiqui is a pesticide lobbyist and Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, an agribusiness lobbying group that represents Monsanto.

Today, the Davy Crockett system has long since been retired, and is now a neat museum piece. You can see a casing of the warhead at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.

But the little nuclear watermelon is a reminder of the big work still to be done in arms control. The just-completed strategic weapons treaty that U.S. President Barack Obama will sign in Prague next week with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev does not cover smaller nuclear warheads in both arsenals that are a legacy of the Cold War — the so-called battlefield, or tactical weapons.

The United States is believed to have about 200 tactical nukes in Europe, all of them B61 free-fall gravity bombs to be used with U.S. and allied tactical aircraft, out of 500 total tactical nukes in the active U.S. arsenal. The Russians are estimated to have about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, several hundred in the European part of the country and the remainder in central storage sites.