Governmental Aerospace Programs
The Federal Aviation Administration, air mail, space programs and military aviation
Power of the Pen
Still picking yourself up off the floor after reading our recent post about the $152,000 that was paid at auction for Neil Armstrong's autograph, along with his famous "one small step" quote, written on a sheet of the Apollo 11 flight plan?Here's what Armstrong had to say in his 2005 biography by J...
April 26, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Manhigh Pioneer David Simons, 1922-2010
Six weeks before Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age, and four years before Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight, an adventurous young biomedical researcher named David Simons climbed to the edge of space inside a pressurized capsule, as part of a project called Manhigh. As we wrote in an article publishe...
April 23, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
X-37: Ready for Launch
On Thursday, April 22, the U.S. Air Force will finally launch its little, unmanned X-37 orbital spaceplane on top of an Atlas V rocket. The liftoff, which will take place in a window between 7:52 p.m. and 8:01 p.m., will mark the culmination of years of development for the newest U.S. spacecraft—an...
April 21, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Stealth: Flying Invisible
In March 1999, during the Kosovo War, as Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko piloted his F-117, he saw two missiles punch through the bottom of the clouds. The unbelievable had happened: A Serbian surface-to-air missile had locked on to his aircraft. Zelko was able to eject, and was rescued shortly after...
April 19, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
240,000-mile Filing Extension
"Dear Mr. Taxman: I'm sorry I missed the deadline. I was, uh, hmm, in a spaceship flying to the moon?"On the evening of April 15, 2010, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's John H. Glenn lecture series honored four legendary men of Apollo 13 on the 40th anniversary of their hair-raising ...
April 16, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
“We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there.”
During a carefully staged appearance at Kennedy Space Center yesterday, President Barack Obama rolled out his plans for the U. S. space program. Although there weren’t many surprises (the White House Office of Science and Technology, under the direction of John P. Holdren, had released a fact shee...
April 16, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Momentous Memorabilia
“Well I can’t say that this thing hasn’t been filled with excitement,” said astronaut Jim Lovell as Apollo 13's crew crowded into the Command Module Odyssey—following the explosion of an onboard tank in the Service Module—and headed back to Earth. CapCom immediately joked, "Well, James, if you can'...
April 15, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
To Do The Heavy Lifting
A recent talking points memo by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) seeks to clarify some aspects of the new direction in regards to the cancelled Project Constellation. Touted by some as “compromise,” it asserts that NASA will develop and build a new “Orion lite” crew vehicle whose...
April 14, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Apollo 13: Eyewitness to the Explosion
"Odyssey, You Have a Problem."If five men in Houston had realized what they were seeing through a telescope on the evening of April 13, 1970, they could have radioed those words to the crew of Apollo 13, who was still trying to grasp what had just happened: an oxygen tank on their spacecraft had ex...
April 12, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Not Your Average Seagull
On April 13, Bonhams auction house will offer a 1917 Curtiss MF "Seagull" Flying Boat for sale. The MF (which stands for "Modernised F-boat") was developed in 1917 from the original F model, a design the U.S. Navy had been using since 1912/1913. (The F model was the most successful of the pre-war C...
April 09, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
NASA Lost its Way
As we survey the wreckage and ruin of yet another NASA “return to the Moon” program, the inevitable “what went wrong?” arguments play out. We’re in a much different place today than we were when Apollo 11 reached the Moon (and each year there are fewer of us alive who witnessed it). To some of us...
April 02, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
America In Space
“The first decade in the Space Age was a unique moment in human history,” says Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator Roger Launius. “For the first time, humanity ventured off its home planet, to explore the moon and elsewhere. And along the way, we experienced both excitement and someti...
April 02, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
Spaceflight Safety: Shuttle vs. Soyuz vs. Falcon 9
Looking to add a little acrimony to your life? Join the debate about the Obama Administration's decision to cancel NASA's Constellation Program. That decision would direct commercial companies, such as SpaceX, which already has 27 unmanned flights on its launch manifest, to take over the job of mov...
March 31, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
A Kiss Before You Spacewalk
Maybe it's the advent of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it's because there are only a few space shuttle flights left. But 50 years into the space age, NASA astronauts seem to be loosening up in the way they present themselves to the public.Case in point: this photo posted on the Twitter page of Clayto...
March 30, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Value for Cost: The Determinate Path
The report of the Augustine committee analyzes America’s space program through a very narrow prism. Much of their report argues that the existing program of record (more specifically, the Ares I and V launch system) is not affordable, a fact already apparent to most observers. Thus, the committee...
March 24, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
F-35 Sticks the (Vertical) Landing
Lockheed Martin's F-35B Lightning II fighter hit another mark in its test program on March 18: the first vertical landing. Pilot Graham Tomlinson gently descended from a height of 150 feet after hovering for a minute above the runway at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Watch for yourse...
March 23, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Cameron’s Camera
Avatar’s creator hopes to direct the first movies shot on Mars.
March 23, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
The First Spacewalk, 1965
Forty-five years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk during his Voskhod 2 orbital flight.Leonov recalled in his 2004 book with Dave Scott, Two Sides of the Moon:
When my four-year-old daughter, Vika, saw me take my first steps in space, I later learned, she hid her f...
March 18, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
A&S Interview: Chris Kraft
NASA's first Flight Director assesses the state of the space program 40 years after Apollo.
March 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
![<b><i>Writer and photographer Ed Darack</b></i> spent time in December 2009 with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 261 (VMM-261) in southern Afghanistan. In addition to Darack’s story, “Osprey at War,” featured in our April / May issue, we offer a slideshow of images taking during his stay.
<br><br>“The pilots put the tip lights on for safety during nighttime and at dawn and dusk,” says Darack. “They just started this one up—you can see the plume of white smoke.”
<br><br>Many of the Osprey pilots used to fly the Boeing CH-46 Sea Knight, known colloquially to the Marines as the “Phrog.” “Basically, coming from the CH-46, I felt safe in the Phrog because it had two .50-caliber machine guns,” says Captain Chris Meixell of VMM-261, “but with this airframe, we have triple-redundant flight controls, and those controls are routed in different parts of the airframe. The engines are 46 feet apart, which decreases the chances of both of them getting shot out by enemy fire, and [the MV-22] can climb to 9,000 feet in airplane mode on one engine. The fuel system is a suction type system, and if you take a round, it is just going to suck air, it is not going to spray fuel. The greatest safety advantage is the performance of the aircraft itself, which allows us to climb quickly out of small-arms and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile range.”](http://media.airspacemag.com/images/200*133/Osprey--4.jpg)
A Tiltrotor Squadron in Afghanistan
Scenes of a Marine unit flying the incredible, versatile Osprey.
March 15, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
