Air & Space Magazine

The Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle at the edge of the sinuous Rima Hadley, July 30, 1971.

Apollo 15 and The Power of Inspiration

Finding a career in the mountains of the Moon

Left your wrench back on Earth? No problem.

A Reality Check for 3D Printing in Space

A National Research Council study tries to rein in the hype.

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Two Star Surprise

The Pismis 24 star cluster contains massive stars. Astronomers once thought the brightest star in the image weighed 200 to 300 solar masses, which would have made it the heaviest known star in the galaxy, but they recently discovered it was two smaller stars orbiting each other.

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Israel’s Iron Dome Gets Boost in Funding After Missile Attacks

A U.S. lawmaker says simply, “It works.”

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Spacecraft Bullet Testing

The ESA used a high-performance light-gas gun to fire a 7.5 mm aluminum bullet to test the Kevlar-Nextel fabric that shields their ATV space capsule from debris. The full shielding is made of many layers, starting with a blanket of insulation, then an aluminum "bumper shield," a layer of stuffing, then the Kevlar-Nextal fabric. Each layer is meant to slow the debris so that the next layer has a better chance of stopping it.

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Douglas A-1 Skyraider

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SR-71A “Blackbird”

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Boeing B-52 Stratofortress

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Sikorsky UH-19B Chickasaw

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Convair B-36J Peacemaker

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Curtiss P-40E Warhawk

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SPAD XIII

What If We Do Find Extraterrestrial Life?

A public symposium in Washington D.C. will take up this provocative topic.

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Emergency Landing

This image from 1951 shows a Lockheed Constellation on a Virginia plantation after the pilot chose to make an emergency landing in the field.

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An Astronaut in Berlin

Photographer Erin Kelly was traveling around Berlin and <a href="http://instagram.com/p/pwnX2cCy-s/?modal=true">found this giant astronaut</a> welcoming her to the Kreuzberg neighborhood. The mural is one of many large scale works by artist <a href="http://www.victorash.net/walls/walls_1.htm">Victor Ash</a>.

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Airships at Sea

The German zeppelin LZ 4, laden with stabilizers, in 1908.

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Air Traffic May Double in 20 Years, While Legroom Shrinks

How do you fit more passengers in fewer airplanes? Guess.

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A Ring Worth 500 Suns

The Herschel Space Observatory discovered a strange ring of dust in this nebula, named NGC 7538. The ring, at the center-top of this image, has a mass of over 500 suns.

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Happy Birthday, America

Let's celebrate the fourth of July with some stars and stripes. In 2004, <i>SpaceShipOne</i> made the first private trip into space, later winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize. Now hanging in the <a href="http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A20050459000">Milestones of Flight gallery at the National Air and Space Museum</a>, <i>SpaceShipOne</i>, along with the <i>White Knight</i> mothership that it launched from, were developed by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, a joint project between Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and Paul Allen. <br><br> Here are four little known facts about <i>SpaceShipOne</i>, as discussed by Dr. Valerie Neal, curator of Human Spaceflight at the Museum, during an "Ask an Expert" event for the spacecraft earlier this week.<br><br> 1. When <i>SpaceShipOne</i> was gifted to the Museum, the design team signed the exhaust. The bright silver signatures can be seen from the floor of the Milestones of Flight gallery.<br><br> 2. On <i>SpaceShipOne</i>’s first flight, the exhaust buckled due to the change in pressure, leaving a dent on the underside of the aircraft. The exhaust was fixed for subsequent flights, but the team intentionally dented the exhaust again to replicate its original state before giving it to the Museum.<br><br> 3. The hybrid rocket engine in <i>SpaceShipOne</i> combined liquid and solid propellant, with rubber as the fuel and nitrous oxide as the oxidizer. These stable and nontoxic propellants gave credibility to the idea of feasible space tourism.<br><br> 4. The successor to <i>SpaceShipOne</i> is, of course, <i>SpaceShipTwo</i>, now owned by Virgin Galactic. Sir Richard Branson says he plans to be a passenger, along with his family, on <i>SpaceShipTwo</i>'s inaugural flight to space later in 2014.

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Exercises in Disaster Relief

A C-130J Hercules flies over Jordan during exercise Eager Lion in May 2014.

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