AirSpaceMag.com

How does it feel to eject from an aircraft going nearly 800 miles per hour?

Terrible.

But test pilot George Smith managed to survive his harrowing ordeal on this day in 1955, after bailing out of an F-100A diving at Mach 1.05 toward the ocean. As recounted in TIME magazine months later, the 40-g deceleration literally knocked Smith’s socks off—along with his helmet, shoes, gloves, wristwatch and ring. Read the account here.

In those days the Air Force was running tests on chimpanzees to see if they could survive ejections at even faster speeds. One set of experiments, which mercifully no one would even propose today, went by the name of Project Whoosh. Some of the subjects did in fact live through Mach 1 ejections.

So did F-15 pilot Brian Udell, whose 1995 bail-out is described here and in the video below:

Mae Jemison training for her shuttle flight in 1992.

PRX Radio ran an interesting piece over the weekend, narrated by former astronaut Mae Jemison, about race and the early space program. NASA and the civil rights movement came of age in the same decade, and by chance, the agency’s main centers were in places like Texas, Alabama, and Florida—the heart of the segregated South. The mandate to integrate the new space agency played a significant role in changing white and black attitudes.

Listen to the story here (you’ll have to register, but it’s free), read the transcript, or read a research paper by Steven Moss, one of the historians interviewed for the piece.

Last week, a third Lockheed Martin F-35B—the coolest variant of the F-35, with its ability to take off vertically then go supersonic—joined two others already undergoing flight tests at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. (It’s shown here leaving the Lockheed facility in Fort Worth, Texas.)

The F-35B, which will eventually replace the Marines’ AV-8B Harriers andF/A-18s, has been racking up the test milestones lately. Last month it engaged its STOVL (short takeoff/vertical landing) propulsion system in flight for the first time, and will now move on to demonstrate actual vertical takeoffs and landings.

The LiftFan system that produces the Lightning II’s vertical thrust may look a little Rube Goldberg, but it’s a marvel of engineering. Inventor Paul Bevilaqua explains how he came up with it in this Lockheed video:

Those who say NASA is giving up on human space exploration may want to take a look at the details the agency just released about where its budgeted money is going over the next several years. The table on page EXP-3 of this document shows more than $15 billion over the next five years allocated for exploration technologies, much of it geared toward human space flight. Over and above that, there is $5.8 billion slated for “Commercial Crew” space flight. Whereas the canceled Constellation program had allocated only $151 million a year for researching human adaptation to space, the new budget puts $215 million into that program for each of the next five years.

And pages EXP-5 through EXP-8 of this document spell out NASA’s broad array of research programs, many of them geared toward human survival in space.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden testifies before Congress last summer during his confirmation. It has become a familiar seat for him—he'll be there tomorrow and the next day to discuss NASA's new budget.

Tomorrow NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will testify before the Senate Commerce science and space subcommittee on the details of NASA’s $19 billion budget request. The following day he’ll be before the House Science and Technology Committee.

Chris Thompson/SpaceX

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket—which the company hopes will usher in a new era of lower-cost commercial space travel—has arrived at its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Engineers are checking out the vehicle’s fuel, liquid oxygen, and gas pressure systems. Once they pass muster, the launch team will do a tanking test followed by a brief static fire of the first stage, according to SpaceX. No date has been set for the inaugural launch, but CEO Elon Musk told Spaceflight Now not to expect it before late April at the earliest.