Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2021-22 i Air & Space

At the height of the first space age, visions of future space travel ranged from the fantastical—the interstellar adventures of Buck Rogers—to the credulous, with NASA planning visits to both Venus and Mars before the end of the century. There was a palpable expectation that the world would see a proliferation of new technologies across the sky, and who could blame the prognosticators—after all, they’d already seen it happen once in their lifetimes. Almost as soon as the Wright brothers cracked the code on the ancient dream of human flight, aero fever encircled the globe (well before the airplanes themselves could do so). Our new Early Flight gallery, opening next year and previewed on page 38, traces the slow evolution of the idea over the centuries and its sudden explosion…

Thursday, December 2, 2021 MIDDLE SCHOOL NEW STEM IN 30 Birds, Bats, Bugs, and Brothers: Animals Pave the Way for Human Flight Human inspiration for flight came from a lot of places, including animals! This episode looks at four animal groups that achieved flight and inspired the fifth (humans!) to develop the ability to take to the skies for ourselves. Time: 1 p.m.ET. Visit airandspace.si.edu/stemin30 to learn more. December and January PRE-K FLIGHTS OF FANCY STORY TIME Premieres at 11 a.m. ET; available on YouTube thereafter. Sponsored by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Releases December 14: Asteroids, Meteors, and Comets. The solar system has small objects like asteroids, meteors, and comets that make a big impact. In this story we learn more about these speedy objects. After the story we…

DAWN HAS JUST BROKEN when a handful of vehicles leave the hangar doors of the Intuitive Machines (IM) production facility, ease their way into traffic, and drive to Ellington Field, an air and space facility outside Houston where the young company tests engines for a spacecraft that will land on the moon. The centerpiece of the small caravan of pickup trucks and towed trailers is a flatbed with rocket engines mounted on the back—what the IM staff call their Mobile Test Stand. “Instead of building a $500,000 test facility somewhere remote, we bought a $16,000 truck and converted it,” says Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus. The vehicles pull through the gate, pause at the security checkpoint, and continue to an abandoned taxiway. Large yellow X’s painted on the asphalt indicate…

IT IS ONE OF THE MOST BIZARRE LOOKING aircraft ever to reach production. Its conception occurred in Australia, its gestation in New Zealand, and its growth and maturation back in Australia. This geography, and unfettered thinking about the TransAvia AirTruk’s mission, drove the airplane’s unusual appearance. In the mid-1950s, the largely agricultural country of New Zealand found itself in need of new aircraft for “topdressing”—spreading soil enhancers and fertilizers by air—what we on this side of the world call “cropdusting.” The old airplanes they had inherited from the British Commonwealth, mostly converted de Havilland Tiger Moths and Piper Cub-like Austers, were wearing out. A few new American designs were imported, but currency restrictions of the day made them very expensive. New Zealanders needed a locally built airplane specifically designed for…

IN THE 1930s many territories on the Arabian coast were under the protection of the British, who held the exclusive right to grant visas and therefore controlled the airspace. Aviators flying to and from the Far East were directed to fly over Persia, not Arabia. Both KLM and Air France had to fly the northern route, while only the British-owned Imperial Airways was allowed to land at the two regular aerodromes on the Arabian side, Bahrain and Sharjah. Such was the British domination of the region that The Times dubbed the airspace over the Persian Gulf “the Suez Canal of the Air.” Among the reasons advanced for banning aircraft from the Arabian side of the Gulf was its desolate terrain, inhospitable climate, and lack of facilities. Aircraft were almost unknown—and…

Caribou, Continued I was the base commander at Thule in 1993-94 and was excited to meet Darryl Greenamyer and his team as they staged from Thule’s aerodrome (“I Was There,” Oct./Nov. 2021). Vern Rich’s overloaded Caribou matched the overloaded Huey they flew to the site. Spare parts, fuel, oil, people, equipment, and food…what organized chaos. BOB COX Pasadena, California Airship Admirer I enjoyed Jon Kelvey’s article “Airships Rise Again” (Oct./ Nov. 2021) but was disappointed that there was no discussion of using hydrogen gas to increase lift capacity. The safety and handling of hydrogen is improving and it seems that it would be useful for providing lift. A hybrid airship incorporating bladders of hydrogen inside the airship’s helium body could reduce the risk of hydrogen mixing with the air while…

I WAS 24 YEARS OLD with brand-new wings on my chest, assigned to the A4 Skyhawk Replacement Air Group (RAG) at Naval Air Station Cecil Field, Jacksonville, Florida. The RAG trained the newly minted naval aviators flying the replacement for the prop-driven Douglas A-1 Skyraider, designed by Collier Trophy-winner Ed Heinemann. Heinemann also designed its replacement, the A-4 Skyhawk jet, which became known as “Heinemann’s Hotrod.” Its mission spanned from close air support to the delivery of a single nuclear bomb. In 1968, I was assigned first to a Replacement Air Group (RAG) and then to my fleet squadron, VA-83, both based at Cecil Field, but soon to move to the air wing of the USS John F. Kennedy for its shakedown cruise in the Caribbean, and then on to…

■ BY CHRISTOPHER MOORE IN THE SPRING OF 1909, vintners and city officials in the city of Reims in the Champagne region of France began planning an event for August of that year that would be called Le Grande Semaine D’Aviation de la Champagne (The Champagne Region’s Great Aviation Week). Just the year before, Wilbur Wright had dazzled the French aeronautical community and fueled a growing enthusiasm for the airplane. At Reims, 400,000 people gathered, and the event electrified its audience. Reims marked the introduction of the airplane to the world. It was the first time many people, especially those in government and the military, would see more than one airplane in the air at a time. A new gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum will invite…

SINCE IT OPENED 10 YEARS AGO, the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar has been among the most popular attractions in one of the world’s most popular museums. Visitors to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia can watch live, from a glassed-in mezzanine, as skilled conservation specialists restore aerospace artifacts as rare as they are historic. On any given day, the objects at hand might include a cockpit floorboard from Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s Lockheed Sirius Tingmissartoq, flown around the world in the early 1930s, or an oxygen bottle from the famed World War II B-26 bomber Flak-Bait. Lately, this special place has seemed even more special. With the Museum’s building on the National Mall undergoing a multi-year transformation, some of its biggest celebrities have spent time in the restoration…

Hello, Down There Oceanographer-turned-astronaut M e g a n McArthur has taken some pretty stunning pictures of Earth from the International Space Station, which she then posts on her @Astro_Megan Twitter feed. Her many photographic subjects include Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho and the astonishing red fingers of the Betsiboka River estuary in Madagascar, colored that way because of over-logging and erosion. In October, near the end of a six-month stay on the station, McArthur spied something she’d never seen—an airplane in flight, its contrails showing clearly against the umber and ocher ground below. “[I]t made me laugh out loud to realize I was spotting an airplane in flight while taking photos over Alberta, Canada today,” she tweeted. “I guess it was nice to see evidence of…

IN A HANGAR IN TARBES, FRANCE, a team of hard-hatted maintenance technicians looked up at the aircraft towering 73 feet above them, the giant that once held the promise of dominating international air transport—the Airbus A380. The team wasn’t there for the airplane’s regular maintenance check. They had come to take it apart. Employees of Tarmac Aerosave, one of the world’s largest aircraft-recycling companies, they would work for the next six months to disassemble for recycling the world’s largest airliner, a four-engine double-decker that was 238.6 feet long with a 262-foot wingspan and an empty weight of more than 600,000 pounds. This A380 had flown for only 10 years, a third of its intended lifespan. It started its career in 2007 with A380 launch customer Singapore Airlines, which began shedding…

LATE LAST SUMMER, when millions of TV viewers were tuning in nightly to watch the world’s best athletes compete in the Tokyo Olympics, I had another world-class drama playing out by day in a YouTube window on my desktop. Near a small border town at the southernmost tip of Texas, a giant rocket, the tallest ever built, was coming together with astonishing speed. Until recently, not a whole lot happened in those marshy flatlands where the Rio Grande flows languidly into the Gulf of Mexico. Boca Chica’s prior claim to historical significance was the Battle of Palmito Ranch in May 1865, the last battle of the Civil War. Then in 2014, SpaceX arrived. Seven years later, thousands of company employees and contractors are working nearly around the clock to build…