All Stories

Get to know Phoebe Waterman Haas, one of the first women in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in astronomy.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in June 1983. Her flight broke the gender barrier in the U.S. spaceflight program. 

My first word was JET, since we lived near an Air Force base and experienced sonic booms on a regular basis. My fascination with the heavens took off from there. Growing up, my family went camping and backpacking a lot, and one of my clearest memories of that time is looking up at a dark, dark sky and pointing out satellites to each other, those little moving points of light that are sometimes so faint I could only see them in my peripheral vision.

Gustave Whitehead claimed to have made a sustained powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine two years before the Wright brothers. But it's doubtful. 

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. 

Look at the larger historical context of air navigation and what it reveals about Amelia Earhart's disappearance. 

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)