Aerospace Inventions
Innovations in aerospace industry
A Brief History of Unmanned Aircraft
From bomb-bearing balloons to the Global Hawk.
May 18, 2011 |
By Ed Darack
The Mojave Launch Lab
A community of alternative rocketeers who may one day dominate the space biz.
May 2011 |
By Stephen Joiner
Found: Air France Flight 447
You've heard of the UAV (unmanned air vehicle). Now check out the AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle): The REMUS 6000. It looks like a yellow torpedo. It's a lot smarter. And it dives a lot deeper.Yesterday, the tenacious underwater 'bot located at long last the remains of Air France flight 447, w...
April 05, 2011 |
By Mike Klesius
Robo-Gull
Wow. Aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal would have loved this. German automation company Festo has built a "SmartBird" modeled on the herring gull that, according to the company, can take off, fly, and land autonomously—just by flapping its wings.The design features a number of innovations, including...
March 28, 2011 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Moments and Milestones: Can You Hear Me Now?
When radio communication took to the air.
March 2011 |
By George C. Larson, Member, NAA
A 747 for Star-gazing
How engineers altered a jumbo jet to carry the world's biggest airborne telescope.
January 2011 |
By Trudy E. Bell
How Things Work: Whole-Airplane Parachute
When everything else fails, or fails all at once, pull the parachute that saves the whole airplane.
January 2011 |
By Michael Klesius
Cat's Eyes
John Cunningham's wartime nickname concealed a vital military secret—the invention of airborne radar.
November 19, 2010 |
By Gavin Mortimer
Landing Like an Owl
This MIT researcher's work is cool enough—he's trying to develop a small UAV that can land on a perch like a bird.But this slow-mo video of an owl coming in for a landing is what really wowed me:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6XSrM0V_0
September 30, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
UAVs for Congress
The bumper stickers available at the door read, "My other vehicle is unmanned."More and more, that's becoming true for a variety of government agencies—and not just the defense department—as was evident at the UAV Technology Fair held yesterday at the Rayburn House office building in Washington, D....
September 23, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Swarming Over Switzerland
This looks like fun work.And the people on the SMAVNET Project think they set a record for the largest number of flying robots (10) deployed at a single time outdoors.
September 20, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
The Truth is Out There
A veteran reporter describes his search for the aircraft of Area 51.
September 2010 |
By William B. Scott
Zephyr Goes for the Record
With UAVs becoming more capable and taking on more missions each day, military users are clamoring for one feature in particular: longer dwell time in the air.DARPA's Vulture program aims to build an unmanned vehicle that could stay up for five years. That's still quite a stretch, considering that ...
August 10, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Admit It, You Want One of These
Engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have built a "Distributed Flight Array"—self-assembling, yet—that could someday be used to airlift objects. See it in action:
June 10, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
A New Arm for the Space Station
As the space station gets its finishing touches (Atlantis carries up a new Russian storage module on tomorrow's STS-132 mission), we'll see some new gadgets come into play. One is the European Robotic Arm, due to be installed on the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module in 2012. A spare elbow for ...
May 13, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Robonaut Gets His Mission
So we thought the last of NASA's rookie astronauts had flown, leaving only veterans on the final few space shuttle flights.Not so fast.One last rookie will be on board space shuttle Discovery when it blasts off in September for the STS-133 mission.After years languishing as a laboratory-only projec...
May 03, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
