Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2021 i Air & Space

On some 1940s maps of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you’ll see a familiar shape between 4th and 7th streets. A full generation before ground was broken on a building for the Smithsonian’s expanding aviation and space collection, the contours were already there—labeled “Future Museum.” Ambitious city plans are nothing new in this town, but seldom have they been so prescient. Nearly 50 years after the National Air and Space Museum opened as a bicentennial birthday gift to the country, the label “future museum” still applies. Human flight has always been a future-facing enterprise. Years before the Wright brothers achieved the first heavier-than-air flight, Wilbur wrote in a letter to the Smithsonian Institution: “I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add…

After three years of fabricating separate components for the NASA X-59 experimental airplane’s many systems, Lockheed Martin has assembled what finally looks like an airplane. The X-59 QueSST (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is being built to hush the loud boom that accompanies supersonic flight. (See “Lower the Boom,” Apr./May 2019.) With a wingspan of nearly 30 feet and a length of nearly 100 feet, the X-59, says its manufacturer, will create a boom about as loud as a car door closing. The first flight is expected next year.…

BAD ACTORS WITH DRONES BEWARE! Recent tests have shown that new weapons systems using radiation can destroy airborne threats. In France, with the 2024 Paris summer Olympics already looming, a test conducted last July by the French Defense Ministry destroyed a drone with a laser cannon developed by the startup company Cilas (Compagnie Industrielle des Lasers). This and other tests have shown the cannon to be effective on drones flying 30 mph at a range of up to 3,300 feet. In the United States, the Air Force Research Laboratory has conducted tests of its Tactical High-power Operational Responder (THOR) system, which uses microwave energy to knock out swarms of drones. In July 2021, the Air Force announced a solicitation seeking contractors to build prototype fieldable systems based on the new…

TOM GRUNDY, the CEO of Hybrid Air Vehicles, started his career working on fighters and drones for BAE Systems, and he was a project engineering manager for Airbus during the development of the A380. But these days his focus is on a type of aircraft that can do things the fixed-wing fliers he has spent his life admiring can’t—even though the basic technology keeping them aloft is substantially older. Welcome to the second age of the airship. Grundy’s company is promoting its striking, pillow-like AirLander 10, initially designed for military surveillance, as a pleasant, low-emission alternative means of regional air travel. In May the company announced plans to begin service for up to 100 passengers per flight on a handful of short-haul routes (Liverpool to Belfast, Oslo to Stockholm, Seattle…

BURLINGTON, NESTLED ON THE LEEWARD SHORE of scenic and snowy Lake Champlain, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Vermont. It is also one of the least likely places for an airplane factory. Nevertheless, the Burlington International Airport is home to BETA Technologies, which is building one of the leading contenders in the race to win certification from the Federal Aviation Administration for an electric-powered, vertical-takeoff-and-landing airplane. At BETA’s headquarters, a small girl stands at the top of the stairs straining to hold a door for approaching adults entering the airy second-floor office area. Her father is Kyle Clark, the BETA Technologies president and founder. He’s also the company’s chief test pilot and designer. Inside the office area, computer work stations dominate the room. But along a long,…

Smoking Section I was particularly drawn to “Light ’Em Up” in the recent (Aug./Sept. 2021) issue. My father smoked his way through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Even as late as 1974, when I was in Air Force boot camp, “Light ’Em Up” was a common yell from the drill instructor during breaks. When I was shipped overseas, ration cards were still being issued for tobacco products on a monthly basis. MARK HASTINGS Dover, New Hampshire Aeronca v. Piper Cub The stories in the Air & Space (Aug./Sept 2021) “We All Fly” issue are fabulous. One minor correction for your readers (and major correction for Cub pilots) is on p. 28, where you identify the airplane in the photo as one of 19,888 Piper Cubs built. The aircraft shown…

PLANESPOTTING IS JUST A HOBBY for Ian Simpson, an aviation fan who lives in England. But for U.S. Air Force pilot Major Grant Thompson, it was a lifesaver. Last July 13, Simpson was in a favorite spot just outside the fence at RAF Lakenheath, home to the U.S. Air Force 48th Fighter Wing. As Thompson took off in his F-15E, Simpson was snapping photos and noticed a shower of sparks coming from the rear of the aircraft. As the fighter continued to climb, Simpson Googled the base, called the switchboard, and reached flight operations. “I said, ‘Look, something is wrong with the plane, definitely. We’ve got lots of photographs of sparks coming out the back,’ ” Simpson, 56, told the Associated Press. The tower informed Thompson of the situation, his…

CELEBRATING ITS 51ST SEASON, the Flying Circus Airshow of Bealeton, Virginia recently hosted its 40th Balloon Festival. The small-town airshow, which offers several types of open-cockpit biplane rides for around $100, manages to draw a crowd every Sunday in its May-through-October schedule. “It’s like stepping back in time when you go there,” says Mark Woodard, a balloonist who’s participated in three balloon festivals at Bealeton. “The whole atmosphere—the wing walking, the Stearmans, the announcer—it’s just a great place.” For more information, visit flyingcircusairshow.com…

Welcome Back! The National Air and Space Museum’s main building on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is now welcoming back visitors. That follows the May 5 reopening of the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Full details at airandspace. si.edu/visit Most Events Are Virtual The National Air and Space Museum is reaching out to its friends through webcasts and online events. Look for this symbol to mark events that are online only. Wednesday, October 6 GENERAL AUDIENCE GE Aviation Lecture: Working Toward Greener Skies The aviation industry is working to make your flight more efficient, innovative, and, ultimately, more green. Join us for a panel discussion of industry experts who will discuss these new technologies and how they’re working to make aviation better for the environment. Time: 8…

SOMETIME THIS FALL, if the launch date doesn’t slip again, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful, most expensive, and most anticipated telescope ever to gaze out into the universe—will lift off from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket. Twenty-six years in design, delayed countless times, the JWST, as astronomers typically refer to it, will dwarf the Hubble Space Telescope in size, resolution, and ability to see very faint objects. Unlike Hubble, which operates primarily in the visible spectrum, Webb will use cameras and spectrographs tuned to near- and mid-infrared wavelengths to view some of the oldest objects in the cosmos, with a sensitivity 1,000 times better than past infrared space telescopes. Webb’s shiny gold-covered mirrors will collect photons that have been journeying our way since a few hundred…

The Wayback Machine THANKS TO PAST SPACE TELESCOPES like the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), astronomers have detected the faint afterglow of the Big Bang that brought the universe into being. But as the material from this primordial explosion spread out through space, it cooled and stopped glowing. Scientists call the period that followed the Dark Ages. Over the next hundreds of millions of years, gravitation started to pull clumps of matter together. Stars formed, began to burn nuclear fires at their centers, and assembled into the first primitive galaxies. These in turn emitted radiation that ionized, or electrically charged, neutral hydrogen in the diffuse fog. It is this period after the Dark Ages—when the lights came on again—that the James Webb Space Telescope…

Sky watchers in the windswept high desert town of Victorville, California, have seen a dazzling array of airplanes over the past 80 years, from the fighters and bombers that flew into the local airfield when it was George Air Force Base to hundreds of about-to-be-mothballed airliners after the former military installation became the Southern California Logistics Airport. But they’ve never seen anything like the Celera 500L. Nobody has. Shaped like an elongated egg with wings and a stubby propeller hanging off the tail, the 500L is designed to leverage the benefits of laminar flow—an aerodynamic advantage that increases efficiency in flight by minimizing drag—to an extent never before seen in a production airplane. At the moment, the prototype is collecting flight data to see just how well extremely low drag…

THE AESTHETIC OF STAR WARS has never emulated the sleek, clean futurism of Star Trek. The spacecraft in the George Lucas fantasy series, like everything else within it, hail from “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” and show signs of serious use, particularly the ships in the fleet of the perennially outgunned Rebel Alliance. When National Air and Space Museum conservators preserve Star Wars props, they’re careful not to “fix” the wear and battle damage the filmmakers built into them by design. No Rebel craft is more recognizable than the X-wing, the nimble class of fighter new recruit Luke Skywalker and his comrades used in their raid on the Death Star, the climax of the 1977 blockbuster that began the legend. Industrial Light & Magic built…

The legendary Saturn V rocket is no longer the tallest kid in the class. The new tallest kid made its first appearance last August, when SpaceX stacked its latest Starship prototype SN 20 atop its Super Heavy Booster for the first time, briefly creating a rocket that stands 395 feet tall, topping the Saturn V by 32 feet. “Dream come true,” tweeted CEO Elon Musk. At the SpaceX Boca Chica facility, a production and launch site on the south Texas Gulf Coast, a 1,000-ton crane hoisted the Starship into position. It was joined to the booster for about an hour, while engineers conducted fit checks. Besides being bigger than the Saturn V, the SpaceX combined craft—the massive booster has 29 Raptor engines—will generate about twice as much thrust at launch.…

Data from the Cassini orbiter, which studied Saturn between 2004 and 2017, has shown that the planet’s core takes up more than half its diameter. Caltech scientists Christopher Mankovich and Jim Fuller compared models of Saturn’s interior with Cassini data to deduce that the planet’s core is not the solid lump of rock and ice once thought. Instead, it’s a diffuse mix of material, including rock, ice, hydrogen, and helium, that takes up about 60 percent of the planet’s interior. As this mix sloshes around, it creates waves in the C ring, the faintest and innermost of Saturn’s three main rings. Although the Voyager spacecraft first spotted these ripples, better data came from Cassini, which peered at stars shining behind the rings. The starlight fluctuated as different amounts of ring…

I’M PART OF THE CREW who in 1995 tried and failed to revive the B-29 bomber Kee Bird after it had languished for half a century on a frozen lake bed in Greenland, about 700 miles shy of the North Pole. This reclamation project was the dream of aviation superstar Darryl Greenamyer, who test flew SR-71 Blackbirds, revolutionized pylon air racing, set absolute speed records, and built his own F-104 Starfighter, before his death in 2018. Back in ’95, Darryl had gotten the B-29’s engines started and was bounding over the snow when the auxiliary power unit started a fire that ended up destroying the airplane. We were stunned. But we had to get home. We got everyone on our crew and all our gear to Thule Air Base and…

The current record for a spacecraft’s survival on the surface of Venus is 127 minutes. Set 40 years ago by the Soviet Venera 13, it was a triumph of engineering. Still, two hours after touchdown, it was curtains, and the landers that the Soviets later sent to visit succumbed in half that time. Now a U.S. team is developing a plan to send a more advanced and much more durable lander to Venus—to brave a world of hellish heat, crushing barometric pressure, and a swirling carbon dioxide atmosphere laced with sulfuric acid. A lot has changed since Venera’s brief working life 39 years ago but not the conditions on Venus. So when I heard that U.S. planetary scientists were plotting an audacious “flagship” mission to revisit Earth’s evil twin, I…

HE WAS WITH THE SPACE PROGRAM before the astronauts were—the official photographer of the Langley Research Center in 1958, when a brand new entity called the “Space Task Group” was created. In the early days of U.S. human spaceflight, William Paul Taub was like the local newspaper photographer in a small town that suddenly became the center of the universe. Everybody knew him, especially the Mercury astronauts, whom he photographed often. They were so accustomed to his presence that they appear unaware of him in these three photographs—portraits of the pre-great, going about the new business of space travel. Gus Grissom (below), in cufflinks and crew cut, is intent on a gimbaled training device designed to demonstrate how astronauts would regain attitude control should their spacecraft tumble. He’s explaining the…