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WASHINGTON - The U.S. Air Force is considering Dugway Proving Ground as a launch site for testing new ultra-fast space jets, but federal lawmakers say that is not the motivation behind a proposal to expand the secretive Army compound in Utah's west desert.

Instead, members of the state's congressional delegation say the Army wants more room at the 800,000-acre bioweapons research and testing site to add a training ground for military counterterrorism operations. According to Dugway's long-term planning documents, the range would include a mock city to rehearse chemical/biological attacks and responses.

"There are a lot of people in the military who are looking into an expansion of Dugway and it would be the ideal facility for this," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, whose district includes the compound 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. "What they are talking about could mean new jobs going to Tooele County, since we'd have to build a lot of the stuff they would need."

Dugway probably is competing with military installations in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to host a counterterrorism training range, said defense policy expert John Pike.

"Everybody is trying to get a piece of the counterterrorism and homeland security pie, and anybody who has a claim of expertise in the field would be a fool not to try to build out on it," said Pike, director of the nonpartisan GlobalSecurity.org. "At Dugway, you have miles and miles of buffer space, and I think it's an obvious place to do something like this."

Bishop declined to give specifics on his conversations with military officials about the potential mission additions or changes being considered for Dugway. He said if the compound grows, "I don't see it as an expansion of the chemical research and development mission, it will be in programs different than that to meet a multi-service mission."

Base officials have refused to publicly disclose why they requested permission in October from brass at the Army Development and Test Command in Maryland to study expanding onto federal public lands to the south and west of the current range boundary.

Those areas would be beneath one of two proposed 400-mile-long, 40- to 60-mile-wide "hypersonic flight corridors" that the Air Force is now studying over Utah, Nevada and California. Air Force officials say the high-altitude jet route would not require additional range area at Dugway and say a recently released study on environmental impacts from the overflights is not related to the Army's expansion study request.

"This would be for testing an air-launched hypersonic vehicle that would fly up into space and then land at Edwards [Air Force Base]," said Gary Hatch, spokesman for the California base that is host to the Air Force Flight Test Center.

According to a draft of the Air Force study on the flight corridors, an unmanned experimental jet capable of flying at Mach 7.5 [seven and a half times the speed of sound] would be released at 40,000 feet altitude from a large jet flying over Utah's western desert above Dugway or the Nevada desert above Nellis Air Force Base. A booster rocket would propel the test jet up to 105,000 feet, where it would then accelerate under its own power to hypersonic flight speed before gliding down to land on a dry lake bed at Edwards.

The Air Force study identified Michaels Army Airfield at Dugway as an alternative landing site for the Utah corridor during the initial launch of the vehicle, as well as a large expanse of salt flat "hardpan" known as Ibex Wells, approximately 60 miles southwest of Delta in the Tule Valley on Bureau of Land Management property.

The study specifies using the western approach to the Dugway strip for any emergency landing of the experimental craft, since there would be "significant risk" to people and base facilities if the craft landed from an the eastern approach. The edge of the new hypersonic flight corridor also would be above the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, site of a proposed high-level nuclear waste storage facility.

No test schedule has been announced, and Air Force and NASA officials say they want to study general environmental impacts in anticipation of future flight test programs. If and when a hypersonic vehicle is tested across the skies of the Great Basin, it's likely the program will be shrouded in secrecy.

"There are a bunch of hypersonic programs floating around various agencies right now, so many that they can't all be real," said Pike, former director of space policy for the American Federation of Scientists. "At this point, it's difficult knowing which ones are real and which ones are just artwork."