Wired Magazine has a good image gallery of 50’s “Right Stuff” aviation. If we only hadn’t stopped researching along these lines …..
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H/T Reader Gary Lynch

When I was an F-4 Crew Chief in the 70’s, I well remember working the grave yard shift and taking my jet to the trim pad for run ups. We used ear plugs, and then ear protection head sets over the top, and even still it was loud. You could feel the vibration in your chest. It’s good to see the guys in Iraq still hard at work.
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Senior Airman Graham Willis and Staff Sgt. Ferdinand Brown observe an engine run up of an F-16 Fighting Falcon July 16 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. During the run up, the mechanics stay vigilant for faulty parts and, after the run up, will fix them on the spot. Going back and forth from full afterburner to idle puts stress and varying power levels through the jet and tests the computer in the cockpit with the jet’s physical responses. Airman Willis and Sergeant Brown are 77th Aircraft Maintenance Unit engine mechanics deployed from Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Julianne Showalter)

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An F-16 Fighting Falcon sits on the flightline before an engine run up July 16 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. The run up of the engine back and forth from full afterburner to idle allows the engine mechanics and crew chiefs to ensure all systems are fully functional before putting the fighter back into operational use. The F-16 is deployed from Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Julianne Showalter)

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I commented the other day about some of the technical reasons why NASA picked Neil Armstrong to be the First Man on the moon.
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NASA was very cognizant that whoever landed first would be the new “Lindbergh”. Neil’s biography doesn’t record, or directly opine on the subject, but it was apparent that NASA was doing early tryouts for the first landing slot in fields completely unrelated to flying skills.
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Several years before, NASA had sent Armstrong on a good will tour to South America with another astronaut and some suits from Washington. Neil’s personality is very quiet. He can speak in public, but he doesn’t offer much extra opinion, about anything. It was obvious during that trip that Neil was the kind of guy who wouldn’t “embarrass” NASA, or the country, at some future date.
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Lindbergh handled fame OK, but before WWII he had gotten involved with the “America First” movement, making speeches across the country trying to prevent the US from getting into WWII, and there were believable rumors that he would try to run for President. I believe he had popularity numbers above FDR at the time, so it was not inconceivable that he might have won. It would have been important for NASA to not hand fame and credibility to someone who might misuse it.
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As much as NASA needed someone who could command the first moon landing, they wanted someone who would represent the agency and the country for decades into the future. With 20/20 hindsight, I think they got the right commander. Neil has spent the last 39 years quietly living an honorable life, almost entirely out of the lime light. Exactly what NASA would have wanted.
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Click the video above. It’s impressive.

Seriously. Story at Yahoo.com.

Two aircrew were recovered from the B-52. The search for more survivors is ongoing. Story at Fox News.

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(Update) Bad news. Looks like the recovered aircrew weren’t alive when picked up. Four others are still missing. Doesn’t sound good. Story at PacificNewsCenter.

39 years ago this evening, I was sitting down in front of the TV with my parents (a *very* rare thing in our family) watching this on our little television. I was about 15 years old and Neil’s first step was merely the fulfillment of what I knew NASA would do. I realized it was a “big deal”, but being a kid, I didn’t really recognize just how big. I suppose it’s all that much more important because we stopped flying there and haven’t been back.
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I’m still reading Neil Armstrong’s biography “First Man” and a lot of it is very interesting. I’ve always been curious how NASA did navigation, but I never realized just how hard the navigation issue was for a moon landing with 1969 technology.
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It turns out the altitude you begin the powered descent is fairly critical, somewhere around 50k feet, within a range of plus or minus 4000 feet. Anything else and they wouldn’t have enough fuel for landing.
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The problem was figuring out the altitude. The Inertial Nav system was pretty good, but subject to drift. It was realigned using ground based radar taken when the LM came around the edge of the moon (which is pretty amazing all on it’s own). But the altitude window was over the center of the moon, and the radars just couldn’t get that much resolution when looking for the speeding Eagle against the lunar background. At the same time, the radar altimeter wouldn’t work at 50k feet. What to do?
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Neil came up with a little “barnyard math” where he used the marks on the LM window to time the passing of a point underneath them. Knowing their speed, the time of the point passing was related to it’s distance, and thus altitude. The time could be compared with a chart made up before the flight to tell the answer.
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A couple of minor tragedies about the historical record of the landing. Neither Neil or Buzz thought much about taking pictures of each other. Neil shot a few pictures of Buzz, but Aldrin was too preoccupied with taking panoramas and things to get a good picture of Neil. He just didn’t think of it. The image below of Neil’s back is the best there is (one other was very badly exposed).
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The other minor tragedy is the TV image. Video from the Eagle was “slow scan tv”, so in order to broadcast it to the world they put another video camera on the CRT screen that displayed the original images. What everybody saw is a video of a video. Lousy quality. The tragedy is that the original data recording of the video stream has been lost. With current computer technology, no doubt it could be restored to very good detail, as the handful of witnesses who saw the actual NASA CRT screen said it was.
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Here’s the Apollo 11 image gallery.
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Wikipedia has more on the missing telemetry tapes, including this astounding still image of both Neil and Buzz on the moon. The detail is good enough you can see the reflections in the helmet visor. The next time you see the stark black and white shapes of the “first step” video, just think of this as the original that we never saw, and now lost forever.
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Tech. Sgt. Joseph Herrera gives a thumbs up to loadmasters during an upload of an HH-60 Pave Hawk into a C-17 Globemaster III July 12 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. The helicopter is configured in a folded position that allows it to be loaded with enough clearance all around. Sergeant Herrera is a 64th Expeditionary Helicopter Maintenance Unit crew chief deployed from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Julianne Showalter)

Like the Marines they are.
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ATLANTIC OCEAN (July 17, 2008) A Marine cleans the canopy on an AV-8B Harrier assigned to Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 264 (HMM 264) on the flight deck of the multi-purpose amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) during the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group composite unit training exercise (COMPTUEX). COMPTUEX provides a realistic training environment to ensure the strike group is capable and ready for its upcoming deployment. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Daniel Taylor

He was “just having some troubles”. At Yahoo.com.

A prosthetic leg, of course. At Local6.com.
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Kind of like Sir. Douglas Bader, except he lost his the second time bailing out of a Spitfire after a midair cut the tail off.

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From the Boeing Press Release:
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EVERETT, Wash., July 14, 2008 — The first Boeing [NYSE: BA] 777 Freighter, the world’s most capable twin-engine cargo airplane, today successfully took to the sky for the first time and completed an initial series of tests during a flight lasting more than three-and-a-half hours.

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ARABIAN SEA (July 14, 2008) An SH-60B Seahawk assigned to the “Saberhawks” of Helicopter Anti-submarine Squadron Light (HSL) 47, embarked aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92), takes supplies to the German cargo ship MV Lehmann Timber after the ship suffered engine problems and became stranded in a storm. Momsen is providing food and water to the ship until a tug arrives. Pirates recently released the crew of the Lehmann Timber after the owners paid a $750,000 ransom. Momsen is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility supporting maritime security operations. U.S. Navy photo

The oldest B-17 and the only B-17D in existence is moved to the Air Force Museum. Story and more images at AF Link. Check out the position of the rear door, and the teardrop shaped window. I assume the “D” originally had the whole teardrop gun blister.

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Restoration crews work together to unload the fuselage of the B-17D The Swoose that recently arrived at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force near Dayton, Ohio, from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

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PACIFIC OCEAN (July 11, 2008) The guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) fires a Harpoon anti-ship missile during the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime exercise. RIMPAC is the world’s largest multinational exercise and is scheduled biennially by the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Participants include the United States, Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, the Netherlands, Peru, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. U.S. Navy Photo

Michael Benson makes the point in the Washington Post that the ISS is nearly complete, but isn’t doing anything of particular value. So why not send it on a *real* mission?
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In the WaPo:

The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft — at least potentially. It’s missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it’s ungainly in appearance, it’s designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system — to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running.

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The vast majority of the energy it would take to send the ISS on a deep space mission has already been expended in the form of getting it into orbit in the first place. And better, we probably won’t have to worry about how to de-orbit it safely once it does become obsolete if it’s a long way from earth.
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This reminded me of an idea promoted by Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin several years ago for a “cycler” spacecraft that would permanently fly between Earth and Mars. The beauty of the proposal is that the large living quarters needed for such long duration trips would not need to be accelerated and decelerated at each end of the trip. All you would need are short duration “taxi” spacecraft that would take people back and forth to the ground, and to bring supplies.
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I vote we do it.