Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2021 i Air & Space

The year 2020 was one that many of us were glad to see move from our calendars into the history books. For all of the historic moments we lived through last year, many of the milestones we rely on were absent—weddings were postponed and graduation ceremonies were canceled. For Olympic athletes, the dream of a lifetime slipped further out of reach—perhaps for a year, and for some, maybe forever. In aerospace history, setbacks and diversions have set individuals on a path to unplanned achievements. In some years, as in 2020, the disruption is a global event. In 1941, a college junior and newly minted private pilot was on his way to his childhood sweetheart’s church organ recital when he heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Hearing…

The last time a robot landed on the moon to collect samples and return them to Earth, Apollo astronauts had been roaming the surface only a few years earlier. The Soviet Luna 24 spacecraft brought back six ounces of soil in August 1976—an impressive technical feat at the time. Fast forward to December 1, 2020, when China’s Chang’e-5 touched down on the Ocean of Storms (above) to gather moon rocks, 21st-century style. It was the third Chinese lunar landing in seven years, and the most sophisticated. As on previous Chang’e missions, the lander used onboard navigation to autonomously tweak its descent trajectory, avoid hazards, and come down in a smooth, safe spot in its pre-planned target area near Mons Rümker, a volcanic formation that rises more than a kilometer above…

A U.S.-European satellite designed to monitor Earth’s rising oceans was launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base on November 21. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich spacecraft—named in honor of the late, former director of NASA’s Earth Science Division—isn’t the first ocean surveyor to be launched. The three Jason satellites (launched in 2001, 2008, and 2016) have been monitoring global sea levels for 20 years, while tracking large weather phenomena like El Niño and La Niña that stretch over thousands of miles. But NASA says that new technology will allow the Sentinel-6 to collect data at much higher resolutions—down to the centimeter for 90 percent of the world’s oceans—enabling it to also measure smaller sea level variations near coastlines, which can affect ship navigation and…

Stratolaunch offered a glimpse of the future when, in October, it posted a photo of the prototype upper composite skin of its Talon-A hypersonic research vehicle on Twitter. When completed, it will test hypersonic payloads at speeds up to Mach 6. While Talon-A can take off horizontally, it will primarily be launched by Stratolaunch’s enormous jet carrier aircraft. Originally designed to launch satellites, the company pivoted to providing a test-bed for hypersonic vehicles following the death of founder Paul Allen in 2018 and its acquisition by new investors. Company spokesperson Art Pettigrue says the carrier offers unique advantages: “We are able to provide a wide hypersonic flight envelope for our customers, with a range of Mach numbers and dynamic pressures, because we are not constrained to a rocket first stage…

Millions of past visitors to the Smithsonian have fond memories of Apollo to the Moon, the National Air and Space Museum’s original exhibit about the 20th century space race. After opening in 1976, the gallery was modified several times over the decades, until construction to refresh the National Mall building began in 2018. Destination Moon, scheduled to open in 2022, is a worthy successor to that exhibit, a new telling of the lunar exploration story for the 21st century. At the time Apollo to the Moon opened, almost all visitors had personally experienced the moon race, if only through their TV sets. The exhibit had many historic artifacts on display, including a giant F-1 engine from the Saturn V rocket and Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s Apollo 11 spacesuits. But there was…

JOHAN SEGERTOFT, HEAD OF THE GRIPEN E PROGRAM at the Swedish aerospace company Saab, speaks about the new E version in terms that might seem more suited to computers than to military hardware: He talks about software upgrades and data layers, coding and multicore processors. “Our job is to let the pilot make decisions faster than the other pilot,” Segertoft says, and, over the years, Gripen pilots have out-maneuvered a few other hotshot fighters in international exercises. The JAS 39E Gripen, which first flew last December, is the latest version of a Mach 2 fighter that rolled out in 1987. To an untrained eye, the Gripen E does not look greatly different from its predecessors which flew 50 years ago. Delta-winged, conical-nosed jet fighters that fly at twice the speed…

On the afternoon of January 27, 1967, the three crew members of the first Apollo mission left the transfer van that took them to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. There, astronauts Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Ed White entered the command module and began a “plugs out” test (that is, with the spacecraft detached from all umbilicals and external power sources) of the launch vehicle and spacecraft designed to carry them on their mission. At 6:31 p.m., a spark ignited in the lower equipment bay of the spacecraft. The atmosphere inside was 100 percent oxygen. The astronauts didn’t have a chance. The evening before the fire that claimed the lives of these three men, loyal viewers had tuned in for “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” the 19th episode of a four-month-old…

THE UNMISTAKABLE SOUND of its main rotor blade was almost as distinct as its bulbous frame. Long before the Vietnam conflict had ended, the “Huey” (its original Army designation was HU-1A, for Helicopter, Utility, Model 1A) was probably the most recognizable helicopter in the world because of its appearances on nightly newscasts. More than 5,000 Hueys operated in Vietnam; around 2,500 were lost to enemy fire. Initially conceived as a utility helicopter optimized for internal stretcher carriage, Huey variants became jacks of all trades thanks in large part to the reliability of its turbine engine, a revolutionary upgrade from the reciprocating piston design of earlier helicopters. Vietnam’s high humidity would necessitate continual improvements to the engine as the Huey became the taxi of the new “air mobility” school of warfare,…

Who Was First? As a longtime American Airlines employee and avid commercial aviation enthusiast, I was quite surprised to learn in “A Forgotten First Flight” (Oct./Nov. 2020) that American was able to claim the distinction of being the first transatlantic landplane service. I had always just assumed that it was Pan Am. DAVID BOZULICH Grapevine, Texas Editor’s reply: Our author John Fleischman notes that Pan Am founder Juan Trippe “moved heaven, earth, and Washington to keep American Export Airlines out of the transatlantic route, invoking a little known proviso in Civil Aeronautics Board regulations that prohibited any shipping line from owning an overseas airline. That forced American Export Lines to sell a controlling interest in their airline division to American Airlines.” AMEX maintenance crews were a hair faster in turning…

When retired Air Force pilot Benny Acock Sr. returned to his hometown of Corsicana, Texas for his 93rd birthday, he was greeted with a birthday surprise: His son Dan had restored his ERCO Ercoupe, named Little “Lil,” which hadn’t been airworthy for many years. Dan landed the airplane at the Corsicana Municipal Airport, where his dad was surrounded by family and friends. Billed as the Model T of aircraft and originally selling for $3,000, more than 5,000 Ercoupes were sold from 1946 to 1952. Today, about 2,000 still exist, and only 1,000 are registered to fly with the FAA.…

The city of Orlando has given the go-ahead to the German aviation company Lilium to build a “vertiport”—a 56,000-square-foot air taxi facility. Lilium has designed a five-seat, fully-electric, piloted aircraft that can take off and land vertically, and travel up to 186 miles within an hour of being charged. The company flew a demonstrator in 2019 and hopes to launch its fleet by 2025. The vertiport will be located in Lake Nova, a planned community that bills itself as “a community of and for the future” and that is seeking to develop a transportation infrastructure that will reduce its reliance on cars. The Lilium vertiport will service both Orlando and Tampa, which gives it access to some 20 million potential customers. Lilium is staking its future on an aircraft design…

OF THE ORIGINAL SEVEN ASTRONAUTS chosen by NASA in 1959, only one, Alan Shepard, made it to the moon. And he almost didn’t. More than two years after his pioneering Mercury-Redstone flight in May 1961, Shepard was in training to command the first two-man Gemini mission. Progress to the moon was planned in three steps: Mercury to prove that space travel was feasible, Gemini to demonstrate rendezvous and long-term spaceflight, and Apollo to go all the way. In 1963, Shepard was a fair bet to fly all three. Then an obscure inner ear condition knocked him off flight status for almost six years, during which time he was given a desk job running NASA’s astronaut office. For a man of Shepard’s ego and drive, it was purgatory. Years later, he…

The big silver airplane parked in an open field was the only worthy target for miles. The Japanese bombers quickly sieved the exposed Douglas DC-3 with hundreds of machine gun bullets. Hugh Woods, a pilot with China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), was watching from a nearby hillside. His heart sank as a 100-kilogram bomb detonated under the right wing of his aircraft, throwing dirt, grass, and splintered aluminum across Suifu airfield. His crew and passengers were alive and unharmed, but his precious airplane was gone. With the wing mangled, there would be no chance of escape. More attackers would soon return to finish the job. The best Woods and his men could do was to hide the wounded airliner among the trees, radio back to base, and hope for a…

Chuck Yeager, who died in December at age 97, was a U.S. Air Force junior test pilot when he was chosen for the mission to attempt to break the sound barrier. The chief of the Air Force flight test division who chose him wasn’t sure the program would succeed. Albert Boyd had been advised that the severity of the shock waves could break the airplane apart. He needed someone fearless, confident, and skilled. That described all 125 candidates in the division, but Boyd later wrote of Yeager, “none of them could quite match his skill in a cockpit or his coolness under pressure.” Yeager climbed down a ladder in the bomb bay of the B-29 carrier aircraft to reach the Bell X-1 cockpit—to him, the worst part of the flight.…

A program at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. to help blind and vision-impaired people “see” the universe has been chosen as one of the breakthrough projects of the year in an international competition. The Tactile Universe was developed by Nicolas Bonne, a vision-impaired astronomer at the university’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. The project uses 3D printers to create tactile models of galaxies, where the image is raised above the base depending on the brightness of each pixel. The competition was sponsored by the Falling Walls Foundation in Germany, which reviewed 940 research projects from over 100 countries.…

“When the Mole first started digging, I was ecstatic. ‘Yes! We’re actually going to make it down!’ Then it popped out [of the hole].” Troy Lee Hudson sighs. He’s the Jet Propulsion Lab scientist and engineer leading NASA’s efforts to excavate beneath the surface of Mars, describing his despair as he got the news that the robotic digging machine was literally moving in the wrong direction. “ ‘Am I seeing this right? Am I looking at the images in the wrong order?’ ” he recalls thinking. “That was my brain going through the stages of grief. I was in denial. I knew that what I was seeing could spell the end of the Mole’s work. But even if it didn’t, I knew the path back was going to be a…

By the time Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969, the moon was well-explored territory. For 10 years, robotic spacecraft from the Soviet Union and United States had been photographing, probing, and mapping it from lunar orbit and from the surface. Tranquility alone had already been scouted twice—by Ranger 8 in 1965 and by the Surveyor 5 lander in 1967. The Soviets went first. Luna 2, carrying tiny USSR pennants and a few simple science instruments for the voyage there, crashed into the lunar surface in September 1959 (soft landings not yet having been mastered). Luna 3 followed three weeks later with a flyby that yielded—after centuries of wondering—our first pictures of the far side. More Soviet wins followed, including the first…

While sitting in the passenger seat of an airliner traveling high above the United States sometime between 2011 and 2014, cybersecurity expert Chris Roberts commanded one of the engines to climb, according to an affidavit filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What brought Roberts to the Bureau’s attention was a tweet he sent on April 15, 2015: “Find myself on a 737/800, let’s see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM,? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? ” The affidavit supported the bureau’s request for a search warrant of digital devices seized from Roberts on April 15, 2015, months after the purported hacking of an aircraft control system. “The FBI never really came out and said [the hack] happened,” said Dan Katz, a senior solutions engineer at the IT security firm Anomali. Roberts, a…