All Stories

Gustave Whitehead (1874-1927), a native of Leutershausen, Bavaria, who immigrated to the United States, probably in 1894, claimed to have made a sustained powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine on August  14, 1901, two years before the Wright brothers.

March is Women’s History Month and those of us trained as women’s historians know that our topics have particular currency in the third month of the year.  But for women in space, the month to celebrate really should be June.

Just when I think I might know something about women in aviation, or just when we think we’ve heard all the stories about “the greatest generation,” I find out about another group who contributed to the World War II effort.  They were not Rosie the Riveters assembling aircraft on production lines nor were they the pilots known as the WASP.  By now, most people have heard of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, 1,074 civilian women who, from 1943 to 1944, flew more than 60 million miles ferrying military aircraft, towing targets, and performing other administrative flying duties for the US Army Air Forces. 

On January 15, 1967, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers played the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs in what would later be known as Super Bowl I.  Sixty years earlier, American football looked much different.  Helmets resembled aviator caps.  Forward passes had been legal for less than a year.

One of the jokes I inherited from my student years is the final exam question "Describe the Universe" which was followed by "and give two examples."

On  6 April 2012, the following notice appeared in the Minor Planet Circular, under the category “Names of New Minor Planets”: (4262) DeVorkin = 1989 CO Discovered 1989 Feb. 5 by M. Arai and H. Mori at Yorii. David H. DeVorkin (b. 1944)

I knew Neil Armstrong, not all that well, but for a very long time.

We will all miss him, not just because he was the first human being in the history of the world to set foot on another body in the solar system, but perhaps especially because of the honor and dignity with which he lived his life as that first Moon walker.

Astronaut Alan “Dex” Poindexter joined fellow Space Shuttle commanders and crewmembers at the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center recently to welcome Discovery to its new home in the Smithsonian. Poindexter commanded the next-to-last Discovery mission, STS-131, in 2010. He also served as pilot on Atlantis for the STS-122 mission in 2008. Both shuttle crews delivered equipment for construction of the International Space Station. Poindexter joined the astronaut corps in 1998 in the midst of a distinguished career as a naval aviator, first as a fighter pilot, then as a test pilot. He served two deployments in the Arabian Gulf during operations Desert Storm and Southern Watch in the early 1990s.

Unlike many astronauts, Sally Kristen Ride did not dream of going into space since childhood. She was already in her mid-twenties, completing her Ph.D. in physics, when the idea dawned. NASA was recruiting women to apply to become astronauts for a spacecraft that had not yet flown: the Space Shuttle.