Air & Space Smithsonian 2021-1.pdf

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MEET THE ‘BLACK HAT’
SQUADRON OF THE
U.S. SPACE FORCE
JANUARY 2021
WHAT THE
NEW
SUPER
HORNETS
CAN DO
The World’s
Fastest
Land Jet
A I R S PAC E M AG .C O M
D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0 /JA N UA RY 2 0 2 1
|
VO L . 3 5
|
N
O
. 6
A Hubble Telescope camera’s
coronagraph blocked the light
from the star Fomalhaut,
creating a dark center in the
debris cloud, where an exoplanet
was spotted. (Story, p. 50.)
FEATURES
24
24
DEPARTMENTS
02
Viewport
32
06
Letters
08
Up to Speed
20
I Was There
22
Museum Events
December is Naval Aviation
month at the National
Air and Space Museum.
The Space Force
Turns One
Bad guys are out there, and
our military satellites are in
danger. But the new U.S.
Space Force is watching.
BY JOE PAPPALARDO
America by Air
A fascinating history of
U.S. air travel unfolds in
a completely renovated
gallery at the National Air
and Space Museum.
BY F. ROBERT VAN DER LINDEN
NASA, ESA, P. KALAS AND J. GRAHAM (UC BERKELEY) AND M. CLAMPIN (NASA/GSFC)
40
50
56
A More Super
Super Hornet
The F/A-18 has always been
versatile. With the latest
avionics and a longer reach,
it’s now more lethal.
BY MARK PHELPS
The Weirdest Objects
in the Universe
There are more things in
heaven and Earth than are
understood by modern
astronomers.
BY DAMOND BENNINGFIELD
800 MPH in a
Jet-Powered Car
In a record attempt next
year, a former Royal Air
Force pilot will keep his
altitude low and speed high.
BY GRAHAM CHANDLER
22
70
Sightings
72
Reviews
78
Contributors
80
One More Thing
58
66
Space According to
Bill Ingalls
For 30 years, we have seen
NASA’s work through this
photographer’s lens.
BY MARK STRAUSS
The Museum that Fell
from the Sky
The last flight of the USS
Shenandoah
airship lives on
in a traveling exhibition.
BY JERRY COPAS
Cover
Here come the Super
Hornets, on a March 2019 photo
flight from Naval Air Station
Lemoore, California. Every F/A-18
delivered after 2004 is in line for
an upgrade. Photo by U.S. Navy
Specialist Shannon Renfroe.
December 2020/January 2021
AIR & SPACE
1
VIEWPORT
From the Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
The Generation Ships
by
Ellen Stofan
I’ve written here before
about a proposed mission
I helped develop a decade ago that would have explored the
hydrocarbon seas of Saturn’s moon Titan. The Titan Mare
Explorer (TiME) proposal took four years to prepare, and
even though the mission ultimately wasn’t selected by NASA,
I’m so proud of that work and that team. It’s not uncommon
for dozens of people to put in many years of work before
a space mission is green-lit, let alone built and launched.
For some missions, the timeline is much longer. Had TiME
been selected, four years of development would have been
followed by four years of design and production before launch,
plus another seven years to reach Titan. That’s more than 15
years from concept to day one on another world. Although
TiME didn’t get picked, decades from now there will be a
boat floating on those alien seas. Meaningful work in space
builds on earlier study and is often decades in the making.
A new mission under study—the Large Ultraviolet Optical
Infrared Survey or LUVOIR—would build the largest tele-
scope ever sent into space. If selected by the 2020 Astronomy
and Astrophysics Decadal Surveyor (undertaken by the
astronomical community every 10 years to set research
priorities), LUVOIR would be poised to make discoveries
within our solar system, study exoplanets orbiting distant
stars, and explore objects across the farthest reaches of space
and time—after another 19 years of development, that is.
Perhaps the best known of the Great Observatories spent
more than 22 years on the drawing boards before launching
in 1990. Thirty years later, the Hubble Space Telescope con-
tinues to unlock new mysteries.
In science fiction, a generation ship is an interstellar ark
2
AIR & SPACE
After decades in development, the Hubble Space Telescope has for
30 years revealed details about stars and galaxies—and merging
galaxies, like NGC 4676, known for the two long tails of stars as
“The Mice.”
■
ELLEN STOFAN IS THE JOHN AND ADRIENNE MARS DIRECTOR OF THE
NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM.
airspacemag.com
NASA/JHU/UCSC/LOSTSCL/ASC SCIENCE TEAM/ESA
whose crew lives out their entire lives on voyages lasting
hundreds of years to reach the stars. The reality of space
exploration isn’t very different—it’s often a relay race of
exploration across decades.
In 1977, after eight years of development, two Voyager
probes launched on a Grand Tour of the outer planets.
On August 25, 2012—after 35 years and billions of miles—
Voyager 1 left our solar system. Six days later, a grad student
named Jamie Rankin—more than a decade younger than the
spacecraft itself—arrived at Caltech and joined the mission
team. Remarking on the storied program and its ranks of
explorers, of which she is now a part, Dr. Rankin said that
each day is like “living in a legacy of discovery.” That is the
price and the promise of space exploration—lifetimes of
discovery and a legacy that will ripple through history.
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