Category Archives: aeronautics
Is Space Tourism Soon to Become a Reality?
With the successful test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) at the end of April, 2013, we are one step closer to commercial space tourism. This is not orbital tourism, of course, but the ability to fly above 100 km … Continue reading
Frontiers of Flight, U.S. Industrial Policy, and Free Markets
In the November-December 2012 issue of Space Time: The Magazine of the American Astronautical Society I published a short article that focused on the government investment that facilitated flight in both the atmosphere and in space. It also discusses the … Continue reading
What is the Space Shuttle’s Place in Modern American History?
It began with the desire to ensure a continuous human presence in Earth orbit during the post-Moon landing era. The result of this effort has required a continued access to orbit with the Space Shuttle, giving humans the experience of … Continue reading
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 170,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about … Continue reading
Notes on a New Book: “Landing in Las Vegas: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Tourist City”
Landing in Las Vegas: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Tourist City. By Daniel K. Bubb. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2012. Shepperson Series in Nevada. How did Las Vegas become the gambling capital of the world, outstripping … Continue reading
NASA’s Space Shuttle and the Department of Defense
During the 1970s, the Space Shuttle became the “sine qua non” of NASA, intended as it was to make spaceflight routine, safe, and relatively inexpensive. Although NASA wanted the shuttle for its purposes, the Department of Defense (DOD) agreed to … Continue reading
A History Mystery: Who is the Gentleman in this Photograph?
Does anyone know the individual in this photograph? A friend forwarded this photograph to me asking if I could identify him. There are a couple of clues worth considering. The first is the date on the image, 1964, and the … Continue reading
Do You Know Me? The Legacy of Neil Armstrong
Do You Know Me? That was the unforgettable phrase that opened a series of classic American Express commercials from the 1970s. In them, people with well-known names but whose faces were not so memorable pitched how that charge card gave … Continue reading
Is There a Military Human Spaceflight Mission on the Horizon?
There has been a long mating dance between the civil and military space programs over the past few the years relative to the role of humans in space. In a succession of recent studies ranging from the Air Force Science … Continue reading
