Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Air & Space

In the spring of 2003, construction was nearing completion at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center ahead of our grand opening on the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first flight that December. Almost finished and completely empty, the Center, in Chantilly, Virginia, was already a sight to behold—hundreds of thousands of square feet of polished concrete, with soaring, 10-story rafters supporting a structure designed to encompass the scope and ambition of the first century of human flight. But the first artifact moved into the Center wasn’t the stately Concorde or the sleek Blackbird. It was a humble Piper Cub—a tiny, yellow trainer monoplane. It sat, in the words of curators Mike Neufeld and Alex Spencer in National Air and Space Museum: An Autobiography, “alone, unarmed, and unafraid” in the middle of…

During the COVID-19 outbreak, Nadine Bubeck put a bunch of household items on a table and challenged her six-year-old son Nicholas to create a toy. Nicholas made an airplane, and thus the company “Creations by Nicholas” was launched. The airplanes, made from parts like Popsicle sticks, corks, and bottle caps, come in multiple colors and are for sale online. Children have the option of ordering a DIY kit to get an early experience of what it feels like to be an aerospace engineer. Any child whose family has been directly affected by COVID-19 can get a kit for free.…

Researchers using the Gemini North telescope’s Near Infrared Imager in Hawaii have collected some of the highest resolution images of Jupiter ever obtained from the ground. The images were created through a technique called “lucky imaging,” whereby a large number of very short exposure images are obtained and then only the sharpest images—when the Earth’s atmosphere is briefly stable—are used. The images, when combined with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Juno spacecraft, reveal that lightning strikes, and some of the largest storm systems that create them, are formed in and around large convective cells over deep clouds of water ice and liquid.…

“I see exploration and courage,” says a young woman. “And I see giant leaps making a comeback.” The inspiring words serve as narration for the latest U.S. Space Force recruiting video, titled “Make History,” released on May 28 to encourage people to join the newly formed military service while also framing the service’s purpose and mission for the broader public. The sixth military service is looking to fill jobs as diverse as “cable and antenna systems specialists” and “space operation officers.” So far, more than 8,500 Air Force service members have volunteered to join—including many who were inspired to apply on May 4, known across the country as Star Wars Day.…

THE MOON IS BARREN, but it’s not dry. In 2018, NASA announced scientists had found evidence of surface ice in the shadows of craters in the polar regions. Those dark, frozen places beckon future explorers. Ice can be melted into water; water can produce hydrogen and oxygen; hydrogen and oxygen can be made into fuel for spacecraft venturing to the moon, Mars, and beyond. “I’m fond of saying that water is the oil of space, just like oil and petroleum products on Earth,” says George Sowers, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, who has 30 years of experience in the field of space transportation. “You have diesel, you have various grades of gasoline, you can use it for creating plastics and all this other kind…

ALL OVER THE WORLD IN 1937, ROYAL HOUSES PREPARED TO TRAVEL to London for the coronation of Britain’s King George VI and his wife Elizabeth. From Japan, Emperor Hirohito dispatched, by sea, a crown prince and princess as his official envoys—and, to the amazement of many Westerners who considered the Far East a technological backwater, a Japanese newspaper sent a pair of Japanese airmen who made the 9,600-mile journey in a state-of-the-art airplane, the Mitsubishi Ki-15. They arrived a full month before the May 12 ceremony and left for home on May 14, delivering one week later photos and accounts of the London coronation scene to their sponsor in Tokyo. In the process, they became national heroes. The flight of the Mitsubishi Ki-15 was the first of an impressive series…

Sonic booms proved to be a bust for commercial supersonic aircraft, which were banned from flying over the continental United States in 1973. But NASA’s newest X-plane, the X-59 QueSST, which is expected to fly in 2021, will provide data that will allow engineers to scale down those booms, so that they sound more like muted thumps (see “Lower the Boom,” Apr./May 2019). The X-59 has an elongated fuselage, so that the shock wave it generates is likewise stretched, rising more slowly—therefore exerting less pressure on the eardrum. The aircraft was cleared for final assembly in late 2019, and, in May, the program reported its latest milestone when GE Aviation announced that the first engine for the X-59 had been shipped. While Chuck Yeager’s X-1 used a four-chamber rocket engine…

IT BURNED FOR A TOTAL OF JUST 192.6 SECONDS during four static tests in 1963, each time producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust. And although this particular Rocketdyne F-1 engine never left Earth, it helped make possible the Saturn V launch that would carry astronauts to the moon. The engine, donated by Rocketdyne to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1970, was one of the original artifacts in the Apollo to the Moon gallery when the Museum opened in 1976. “The gallery was built right after the Apollo program,” says curator Michael Neufeld, “and it was designed with the assumption that the public understood the program, that they’d just experienced it.” But now almost 50 years have passed, and audiences have changed. “We have to create an exhibit…

Companies mining lunar ice confront a dilemma: An ideal place to extract ice is at the bottom of deep craters shrouded in perpetual darkness. But that darkness also deprives them of easy access to sunlight for solar power. Trans Astronautica CEO Joel Sercel’s solution is an array of towers—each a kilometer tall—called “Sun Flowers” to power the outpost’s facilities. Their feet—which are solar arrays that sit on the dark permafrost—are bathed in sunlight reflected from lightweight disk-shaped heads high above in the sun. Robotic mining rovers, called “Beetles,” would run on water fuel cells.…

THERE’S A FAMOUS RUSSIAN SAYING: Something new is something old that everyone has forgotten. Consider the MiG-31 fighter, a seemingly obsolete 40-year-old warhorse that may be on the verge of a dangerous second act, or even a third. The -31, whose forte back in the 1980s was chasing U.S. SR-71 spyplanes at enormous speed 12 miles above the Soviet Arctic, has officially been repurposed as a delivery vehicle for the Kinzhal (“dagger”), one of the family of hypersonic missiles Vladimir Putin is counting on to get Russia back into the global arms race. But that’s the less intriguing job. What’s really roiled defense aviation geeks for the past two years is a photo, posted by unofficial snoops, of a MiG-31 carrying a mystery missile that looks even bigger than the…

EVERY YEAR BETWEEN 1953 AND 2019, the Experimental Aircraft Association held a convention of aviation enthusiasts, which, as readers of this magazine know, has grown into the largest, most famous celebration of private aviation in the world. In that time, the EAA has hosted some of history’s most significant aircraft—and some of its most outlandish. Burt Rutan’s world-circling Voyager and his revolutionary VariEze, the Boeing 747 on its 50th birthday, the last flying Lockheed Vega—all have basked in the adulation of audiences who know a great airplane when they see one. For 60 years, airplane lovers the world over have made a pilgrimage in late July to Oshkosh, Wisconsin (and before 1970, to Rockford, Illinois) to what the EAA calls AirVenture but most of us know as “Oshkosh.” But not…

A 97-MPH SINGLE-SEATER with a 100-foot wingspan, the Messenger is the smallest crewed aircraft the Army ever used. Its compact frame was key to its versatility. Alfred V. Verville’s 1920 design responded to a U.S. Army Air Service request for an aircraft to replace the motorcycles shuttling officers from one warfront station to another. Lawrence Sperry, whose company the Army hired to build Verville’s design, grabbed attention by landing his personal Messenger on the U.S. Capitol steps to protest the slow payment of his invoices. By 1921 he was already marketing a two-seat “Sport” variant, touting its ability to be kept in a garage, no hangar required. What the Army designated the M-1 became a platform for experimentation: Pilots tried out versions with skis for use on snow, and modified…

How Did They Do That? I was intrigued by your story “The First Air Force One” (June/July 2020). I saw Columbine II in July 1955 at Keflavik Air Station, Iceland, when I was a first lieutenant in the 57th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron flying F-89Cs. President Eisenhower was returning to the States after a Big Four summit meeting in Geneva. He took a tour of the base, had some lunch, and made ready to depart. It was then that I saw something that I have never seen before or since. As the cabin door closed, all four engines started simultaneously and Columbine II started taxiing immediately. I later talked to four-engine pilots who stated it couldn’t be done. There must have been a humongous auxiliary power unit on board. Perhaps Mr. Asche,…

At the center of the Milky Way, superheated gas spirals into a four-million-solar-mass black hole known as Sagittarius A*. And now, thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, it’s possible to see this spectacle firsthand through virtual reality. By combining data from Chandra and other telescopes with supercomputer simulations, this new visualization allows users to witness 500 years of cosmic evolution, spanning an area of space measuring about 18 trillion miles. Researchers modeled 25 very bright objects known as Wolf-Rayet stars (represented by white dots, below), which blow off their outer layers into space to create supersonic winds (colored blue and cyan) that are then captured by the black hole’s gravity.…

Locusts, the scourge of farmers for millennia, also pose a threat to aviation worldwide. They fly as high as 3,000 feet and in swarms of up to 50 million, according to the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Like drones, birds, and other creatures sharing the sky with airliners, locusts typically pose the greatest danger to aircraft that are landing or taking off. Last January, an Ethiopian Airlines 737-700 was forced to make an emergency landing after it flew into a swarm: Locusts got trapped in the engines and splattered across the cockpit window, reducing visibility. Now India, which is seeing its worst recorded locust activity in 20 years, has issued guidelines to pilots on how to cope with the crisis. “Use of wipers at times may cause the smear to…

Eventually, sports arenas will once again fill up with eager fans, and one of the many challenges in the era of the coronavirus will be regularly sanitizing such large facilities. A Syracuse-based startup called EagleHawk believes it has a solution: deploying drones to spray liquid disinfectant. The drones—which previously had been equipped with thermal cameras to inspect commercial roofs and heating systems—are fitted with sprayers connected by a hose to a tank on the ground. EagleHawk demonstrated the technology at Sahlen Field (above), home of the Buffalo Bisons baseball team, and hopes to provide the service to every team in the region.…

National Air and Space Museum curator Dorothy Cochrane has received the National Aeronautic Association’s prestigious Katharine Wright Trophy. The trophy is awarded annually to individuals who make “a personal contribution to the advancement of the art, sport, and science of aviation and space flight over an extended period of time.” Cochrane was recognized for her more than 40 years as a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, collecting and preserving aviation artifacts that inspire and educate the public about the importance of flight. Cochrane has acquired more than a dozen aerobatic, business, and general aviation aircraft for the Museum, and was responsible for the restoration of Betty Skelton’s Pitts Special, Little Stinker . Cochrane, the NAA notes, “embodies what this award is all about.”…

On Monday, February 24, 2020, at about 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern time, a robotic spacecraft named MEV-1 is traveling some 22,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean in a geosynchronous orbit. A satellite at that location holds a fixed position over the equator because its speed matches that of Earth’s rotation. At the moment, MEV-1, which stands for Mission Extension Vehicle-1, is in pursuit of its client, a $200 million satellite called IS-901. Intelsat owns and operates the satellite, which was launched 19 years ago. In December, IS-901 reached the end of its expected lifespan, and because it was low on fuel and unable to remain stationary over the equator, Intelsat commanded onboard thrusters to push the satellite 185 miles farther from Earth, into the so-called “graveyard orbit,” where geo spacecraft…

KIDS LOVE A PUBLIC DISRUPTION and, as a child, I was always a great fan of school-canceling snowstorms and municipal strikes. As a grumpy, self-important adult, I grew to expect that I could fly the Atlantic anytime I had the time, money, and a reservation—until this virus-haunted spring when I found myself grounded in Lombardy, the Italian epicenter of the Covid-19 epidemic. It was brutal there—so many sick, so many dead, all heralded by the wail of ambulance sirens day and night. We’d planned to fly home in early April. Then in mid-March, America discovered Covid and Delta Air Lines cut its transatlantic schedule to one flight a day from five cities (none in Italy), all to be operated by its European code-share partners. We were stuck. But after four…