Topic: Flying Machines

Flying Machines

Vehicles designed for air and space flight

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Beyond LEO - Flexible Path Revisited

In an interesting post at Vision Restoration, “Ray” tackles the desultory Flexible Path (FP) architecture of the Augustine committee, which calls for human missions to low gravity destinations and delays missions to the lunar and martian surface.  The problems he finds with FP are similar to points...
January 23, 2010 | By Paul D. Spudis

<b><i>Visit the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum,</b></i> and you’re guaranteed to see historic aircraft and spacecraft, including the original Wright 1903 Flyer, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress <i>Enola Gay</i>, the SR-71 <i>Blackbird</i>, and the Space Shuttle <i>Enterprise</i>. The Museum also boasts a multitude of artifacts large and small: engines, propellers, aerial cameras, more than 2 million technical drawings—even popular culture items such as Charles Lindbergh-emblazoned underwear. <br><br>But what people may <i>not</i> know is that part of the Museum’s mission is to tell the story of aerospace through art; during the Museum’s creation, Congress mandated that one gallery be specifically dedicated to aerospace artwork. <br><br>Which brings us to an important donation. Michael and Maureen Harrigan, of Kendall, New York, recently gave the Museum 42 prints by renowned aviation artist Robert Taylor, a collection acquired over some 20 years. <br><br>When Mike Harrigan’s firm, the Harrigan Brady Paper Company, moved to its new location in 1988, Harrigan asked his (mostly female) staff for suggestions on how to fill the empty wall space. “They wanted paintings of daisies,” he said, somewhat mournfully. Because of the company’s proximity to the Greater Rochester International Airport, Harrigan suggested an alternative: pictures of airplanes. <br><br>As senior aeronautics curator Tom Crouch reported in our March 2010 issue, the first Robert Taylor print Harrigan acquired was titled <i>Home at Dusk</i>. (The print depicts four P-51 Mustangs crossing the East Anglican coast on their way back to base.) Harrigan’s interest in aviation art grew from there; he eventually collected so many Robert Taylor’s prints that his staff took to calling him “Imelda Marcos.” When he ran out of available wall space, Harrigan wasn’t deterred in the least—he hung the remaining prints in the men’s room. <br><br>Harrigan’s art collection began to gain a bit of fame in the Rochester area, with customers, postal carriers, and the random citizen showing up during work hours asking for a tour. Visitors were so frequent that “the girls suggested I start charging a fee, and we could have a party with the money,” joked Harrigan. <br><br>As Tom Crouch wrote, “Someone once asked Mike if he would ever part with the collection. His answer: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if the Smithsonian walked in, I’d have to consider it.’ To make a long story short, we did, and he did.” <br><br>When the Smithsonian crew came to package the collection for transport, Harrigan had one request: to wrap up <i>Home at Dusk</i> first, and to box up the final print he acquired, last. “There was a tear in my eye,” Harrigan said, as he watched the crew package his collection, piece by piece. “All of the girls were crying. They knew how much those prints meant to me.” <br><br>The Harrigans’ generous donation can currently be seen, in part, on the lower level of the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Once the new restoration wing is completed, in 2011, the collection will be displayed in its entirety. Click on the images at right to take a closer look at a few prints from the collection. <br><br>The painting shown here, <i>Morning Thunder</i>, includes a note from the artist, Robert Taylor: “Sunday, December 7, 1941 <br><br>Having taken six torpedo hits and two bomb strikes in the first-wave attack on Battleship Row, the <i>West Virginia</i> is ablaze, her bows already low in the water and decks awash. Ignoring the risk, crews push the Navy tug <i>Hoga</i> alongside with fire-fighting equipment and to pick up survivors. Overhead, Japanese Zeros swoop through the smoke, aiming the second-wave attack at installations on Pearl Harbor’s Ford Island, to complete one of history’s most devastating unprovoked declarations of war.”

The Gift of Art

A recent donation by Michael and Maureen Harrigan helps the Museum fulfill its mission.
January 21, 2010 | By Rebecca Maksel

Senator George Gunther with the Corsair, the state aircraft.

Restoration: Connecticut's State Warbird

What World War II fighter was a product of the Nutmeg State?
January 2010 | By James Wynbrandt

Robotic Sample Return and Interpreting Lunar History: The Importance of Getting it Right

Deciphering the cratering history of the Moon is an important scientific problem.  My previous post discussed early lunar cratering history, the apparent impact “cataclysm” 3.8 billion years ago, its significance to Earth’s early history and how remaining questions might be resolved by collecting a...
January 11, 2010 | By Paul D. Spudis

Cataclysmic Events on the Moon

NASA recently announced that it has down-selected three New Frontiers mission concepts for additional study.  One of these missions, Moonrise, proposes to return rock and soil samples from the floor of the largest impact crater on the Moon, the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, centered on the souther...
January 09, 2010 | By Paul D. Spudis

Kepler's First Planets

It's nice when an expensive new machine works as advertised—nicer still when that machine has the ability to revolutionize a whole field of science.At this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, scientists couldn't stop gushing about the exquisite performance of NASA's K...
January 08, 2010 | By Tony Reichhardt

The Douglas marketing team used this model to present the 1211-J to the U.S. Air Force in 1950

The Do-Everything Bomber

With its bid to replace the Convair B-36 bomber, did Douglas promise too much?
January 2010 | By John Aldaz and Sir George Cox

Canadian lads, eager for a brush with World War II glory

Ode on a Canadian Warbird

The author remembers childhood, with round engines.
January 2010 | By Bruce McCall

A-37A entered combat in South Vietnam

Legends of Vietnam: Super Tweet

Yeah. The A-37 was small. So was Napoleon.
January 2010 | By Stephen Joiner

The author with his anti-sub Lockheed Orion

Above and Beyond: Adventures in the South China Sea

January 2010 | By Tracy Wilkinson

Pilots needed a computer to fly Grummans X-29

Moments and Milestones: Swept Forward

January 2010 | By George C. Larson, Member, NAA

John Magda (mounting his Blue Angel Panther in 1950)

Restoration: Kentucky Panther

Grumman's first jet honors a son of the Bluegrass State.
January 2010 | By Barrett Tillman

The Air Force hopes its unmanned X-37

Space Shuttle Jr.

After 2010, the only spaceplane in the U.S. inventory will be the Air Force's mysterious X-37.
January 2010 | By Michael Klesius

The authors daughter, spellbound by a Hercules C-130

Flights and Fancy: Like Father, Like Daughter

January 2010 | By David Unekis

The Search for a Real "Pandora"

In the three years since film director James Cameron wrote the script for his new blockbuster Avatar, a lot has changed in the field of exoplanet research (the study of planets around other stars). Nobody knows this better than one of its leading practitioners, Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smith...
December 30, 2009 | By Tony Reichhardt

Inching Closer to Clarke's Prediction

In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written as Stanley Kubrick was adapting it to a screenplay for his 1968 film, author Arthur C. Clarke philosophizes deeply on the convergence of man and machine. While the human astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman affect an almost robot-like discipline and de...
December 28, 2009 | By Mike Klesius

Inside Track

The Cassini probe to Saturn and Titan is just one of those spacecraft that keeps returning very cool stuff, such as the beautiful view of Saturn during its equinox a few months ago.Now, the mission has just released tantalizing footage of Saturn's moon Janus, which is about 111 miles across, overta...
December 24, 2009 | By Mike Klesius

A segmented 76-foot airship during flight testing over Stuttgart, Germany.

Sky Snake

Flexible blimps are bending the rules on UAV design.
December 18, 2009 | By Michael Klesius

Wet World

Announcements of newly discovered planets come so frequently these days that it's hard to tell which ones are significant. But GJ 1214b deserves its moment of fame.Discovered by a team led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the planet is only 5.4 times the diam...
December 17, 2009 | By Tony Reichhardt

A Meteorite From the Moon

In 1982, the idea that a chunk of rock could be hurled from the moon to Earth by a lunar impact was considered pretty far out. For one thing, wouldn't such a massive, high-energy explosion destroy the evidence by turning the excavated rocks to glass? Besides, meteorites were well known to come from...
December 16, 2009 | By Tony Reichhardt


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