NASA Puts Hands-Free Linkup to a Test

NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, known as DART, will leave California's Vandenberg Air Force Base suspended beneath a Stargazer L1011 aircraft, which will drop it shortly after 2 p.m. Eastern time about 40,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. A Pegasus rocket will ignite and carry DART into orbit to catch up with a military satellite flying 475 miles above Earth.

The Bush administration is billing DART as the opening act in its "Vision for Space Exploration" to the moon and Mars -- the prototype for a workhorse, low-cost vehicle that could just as easily hump supplies to astronauts in outer space or repair unmanned Earth-orbiting weather satellites.

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