The Air and Space Museum
A great place to visit. No other place like it. |
UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles |
A World War 1 aircraft belonging to the Baron von Richthoven's Flying Circus |
I am still trying to figure this out. It is a pusher propeller craft with radial engine. A period movie shows wings & tail attached & it taking off. |
Snoopy's imaginary ride, the Sopwith Camel |
The Wright Brothers' Bicycle Factory
The entire first motorized flight took place within the length of a modern Boeing 747 aircraft |
And that was all there was to it. If they hadn't, someone else would have. The time was right for it. |
Interesting meeting of noses here. The Bell X-1, the first aircraft to break the speed of sound, the X-15, the first aircraft (rocket propelled) to go at hypersonic speeds and go into space, and Burt Rutan's ingenious design of the aircraft-launched Spaceship One, that flew into a suborbital trajectory and was a private effort. |
Ended up giving a brief lecture to a mom, kids, and some adults about the status of the Mars Rovers, some of the findings, those of the MRO, and the new massive rover (the MSL), that's about to land on Mars, Curiosity. |
In the beginning there was the V1. The 'Buzz Bomb', that incorporated the state of the art rocket science of the time |
Only to be quickly surpassed by the V2 (in black and white), a true vertical launched, liquid fueled rocket. The progenitor of all we see here. It is thought that the Russian got their hands on the more advanced multi-stage, longer range A2. |
The M-2 F-3 Lifiting Body already proposed in the late 1950s is still considered in modern guise |
The old Dyna Soar lifting body idea is not forgotten by any means. Instead the shape gets continually refined and re-proposed for new missions. The X-38 was to have functioned as an ISS rescue vehicle |
You can see the scale of the two space vehicles here, as they were once briefly joined in orbit. On the left the US Apollo spacecraft and on the right the Soyuz craft of the USSR, still in use today |
The Eagle has Landed - a moment of incredible triumph, now aspired to by the Chinese and Europeans, not to mention the Russians |
How it might have looked - I composited a Lunar backdrop into the Smithonian close-up |