Get to know the night sky in this free, live planetarium show. Astronomy Program Observe the Sun DC Metro Area Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm, weather permitting. Observe the Sun ...

Dragonflies and other flying insects flap their paper-thin wings very fast to help them fly. Their bodies are thin and sleek.

Near the end of World War II, Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro recommended that the Japanese navy form special groups of men and aircraft to attack the American warships gathering to conduct amphibious ...

The Hamilton Standard Hydromatic propeller introduced in the 1930s was a significant advance over the counterweight, controllable pitch propeller. Application of oil pressure to both sides of the ...

Pratt & Whitney developed the TF30 turbofan engine as a private venture, originally working with Douglas Aircraft in early marketing considerations for the DC-9 small jet transport. However, what was ...

This slide rule belonged to Dr. Sally K. Ride. Before pocket-sized electronic calculators became available in the 1970s, slide rules were used as an aid to complex mathematical operations. Ride used ...

In the 1960s, the United States began developing a supersonic transport (SST), the Boeing 2707. General Electric’s GE4 was intended to power the 300-seat airliner to a speed of Mach 2.7. Based on ...

In the early 1950s, the U.S. military established a requirement for a high thrust, low weight, mechanically simple jet engine that could perform efficiently at Mach 0.9 cruise and Mach 2.0 combat ...

The lithium hydroxide canister was designed as a replaceable filter for the command module's environmental control unit (ECU). The ECU provided cooling, water and breathable oxygen for the astronauts’ ...

Each Apollo mission was equipped with two rucksacks providing equipment to allow for crew survival for up to 48 hours on land or in the water after landing. This is one of two rucksacks flown on the ...

The Raymond Orteig Historical Archive consists of approximately 188 documents relating to the prize of 25,000 dollars offered by Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris or ...

The PLF1A-2 was the first high bypass (6:1 bypass ratio) fan engine run in North America. Lycoming's high bypass fan engine concept evolved from a 1950s series of conceptual studies directed to better ...