Category Archives: aeronautics
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
Announcing a New Book: “Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space”
Dennis R. Jenkins and I have just published a new book, Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space, issued as NASA Special Publication-2011-593. It’s available now, free as a downloadable a PDF here. One of the most difficult tasks with which … Continue reading
Is there an Intrinsic Superiority of Reusable Space Launch Vehicles over Those That are Expendable?
A debate has long raged between those who believe that reusable launch vehicles (RLV) are the only—or at least the best—way to fly to and from Earth orbit and those who emphasize the continuing place of expendable launch vehicles (ELV) … Continue reading
Wednesday’s Book Review: “Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight”
Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight. By Maura Phillips Mackowski. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Centennial of Flight Series. Maura Phillips Mackowski has written a very interesting, readable, and significant book that I … Continue reading
Redirect: The Desegregation of Airports in the American South
My friend and colleague Anke Ortlepp, the current Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum here in Washington, D.C., has just posted on-line a terrific analysis of the desgregation of airports in the U.S. South. I … Continue reading
Thoughts on the NACA Model for Technology Transfer
I published this week an op-ed in Space News entitled “The NACA Model for Technology Transfer.” In this piece I laid out the manner in which the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) approached the issue of deciding, developing, and … Continue reading
Whatever Happened to the National Aero-Space Plane?
From almost the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, NASA realized that it would need to replace its fleet in the first part of the twenty-first century. Understanding that it took almost a decade to build a new … Continue reading
Great Images: What Routes Do Airlines in the U.S. Use?
There is a terrific post on “Geographic breakdown: Where do major airlines fly?” It has a graphic representation of the United States and the routes flown by each of the major airlines. It’s fascinating to go through this material and … Continue reading
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