VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- In a clean room at Vandenberg Air Force Base's processing facility in California, NASA's NuSTAR spacecraft undergoes a limited performance test, a two-day functional checkout of the spacecraft. A Pegasus XL rocket is set to launch NuSTAR into space. Once the rocket and spacecraft are processed at Vandenberg, they will be flown on the Orbital Sciences L-1011 carrier aircraft to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the Pacific Oceans Kwajalein Atoll for launch. The high-energy x-ray telescope will conduct a census for black holes, map radioactive material in young supernovae remnants, and study the origins of cosmic rays and the extreme physics around collapsed stars.