News
The Business of Risk
The successful Sept. 29 launch of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne marked a potential beginning for a new era of civilian space tourism. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe attended the flight, and afterward congratulated Rutan and pilot Mike Melville on the groundbreaking achievement.
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X-43A Captive Flight Succeeds, Air Launch Next
NASA aeronautics researchers are looking forward to flying the X-43A research
aircraft at speeds up to 10 times the speed of sound this fall, following a
successful "captive-carry" dress rehearsal flight from Dryden Sept. 27.
According to X-43A lead operations engineer David McAllister, test director
for the mission, the captive-carry flight duplicated all operational functions
of the planned 7,000-mph - or Mach 10 - flight and served as a staff training
exercise, replicating all aspects of the mission flight except that the X-43A
and its modified Pegasus booster were not released from NASA's B-52B launch
aircraft and their engines were not ignited.
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People
Dryden's 'Rat Pack'
They're affectionately (if unofficially) known as the hangar rats. They've been fixtures on the Dryden landscape for decades. And their mandate is simple, but far from easy: keep the planes running - safely.
F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18s, manned and unmanned experimental aircraft, research testbeds and a wide assortment of other flying machines winged, instrumented and otherwise - these are the planes that made Dryden famous. The hangar rats are the guys who make sure the pilots who fly those planes take to the skies safely. Every time. So those same pilots can also, in turn, bring the plane back down to the runway safely, and live to do it all over again.
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Research Roundup
Chasing Dust Devils
Growing up in Boron, Gregory Peters knew all about dust devils. Over the years, he frequently noticed clouds of dust coming off the Edwards Air Force Base lakebeds when he traveled around the Antelope Valley.
So it was only natural for Peters, now a Jet Propulsion Laboratory operations lead for the Extraterrestrial Materials Simulation Laboratory, to recall his roots when talk of dust devil studies began. In fact, he still has roots in the Antelope Valley and his mother, Linda Peters, is Dryden's Video Systems supervisor.
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BriefExploration, History Come Together on NASA Web Portal
Forty-six years ago, on Oct. 1, 1958, NASA began its unprecedented journey of exploration and discovery. To commemorate the anniversary, a series of essays titled "Why We Explore" offering historical perspectives on fulfilling the vision for space exploration is being offered online.
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