AirSpaceMag.com

In researching a reader’s letter about “Department of Flying Saucers” in the Sept. 2010 issue, I came across a report on the Web site, UFO Casebook, which claimed that General Omar Bradley had been flown overseas to view alien beings retrieved from a UFO crash site in the Arctic Circle. The report writer, Billy R., put it thusly: “In the early 50s her husband, who did not talk much about his work, told her he had flown the general to Germany to see some little space men approximately 3 feet tall and dead.”

Well. Surely that beats alien vampires, who would perhaps be the same height but undead.

It’s not new material, but if you haven’t seen this, you owe it to yourself to take a couple minutes to watch. Austrian skydiver Paul Steiner did some ambitious wing walking earlier this year in this Red Bull video, with a pair of Blanix gliders flown by Ewald Roithner and Kurt Tippi high above the Alps. Not sure what the stunt offers beyond a great airshow trick and awesome scenery, but it’s pretty entertaining. Expand the video to full-screen and you’ll see that the resolution is still very nice.

You may have read about the X-37B, the U.S. Air Force’s new unmanned orbital spaceplane, in our January issue. The secretive satellite with space-shuttlesque delta wings made its first launch on April 22 of this year atop an Atlas V rocket, and has been in orbit since, visible on the web via a number of satellite tracker apps such as this one.

The X-37B, prior to launch. Photo: U.S. Air Force

That is, until July 29, when the spaceplane mysteriously disappeared. It took two weeks of cat-and-mouse before amateur astronomers got a fix on it again, roughly 19 miles higher and traveling in a different orbital plane. Looks like the little satellite is living up to its predicted versatility, and its shady reputation. The Air Force has disclosed that the X-37 can stay in space for up to nine months, at which point it will return like the space shuttle and glide to a pinpoint landing at Vandenberg or Edwards Air Force Bases in California.

Read more about the disappearing act here.

However the Copenhagen Suborbitals project turns out, you have to give these people points for nerve. The eventual plan is to launch a human to an altitude of 100 kilometers inside a capsule barely large enough to fit one person, standing up. For the moment, the Danish team would be happy just to launch a test dummy to that altitude, from a barge in the Baltic Sea. The launch window for the HEAT-1X rocket opens in six days.

It’s always difficult to know whether to take these kinds of efforts seriously. Some X-Prize contenders, past and future, clearly have had little chance of succeeding. But this group at least seems to be having fun. (I like the portrait of Soviet rocket pioneer Sergei Korolev in the control room in the video below. Can’t make out the other guy—Tsiolkovsky maybe?)

With their tiny budget of 50,000 Euros, a lot of it from donations, this volunteer army doesn’t mind poking fun at the big guys. Co-founder Kristian von Bengtson told The Independent: “”I think our entire budget would barely cover the cost of the key hole [sic] on the shuttle. We want to show people that space doesn’t need to be the exclusive domain of big money investments where everything is made out of titanium in clean rooms by people wearing white slippers.”

Better to dress like school crossing guards, apparently:

It took 18 years for someone to claim the $100,000 prize offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer for the first sustained (mile-long) human-powered flight. On this day in 1977, the Gossamer Condor, built by Paul MacCready and flown by bicyclist/ hang-glider pilot Bryan Allen, won the challenge.

The 1978 video below gives a good account of the flight. MacCready reminisced about the Gossamer Condor in a 2003 Ted talk. And Bryan Allen is now a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He did his own reminiscing for the JPL Bicycle Club a couple of years ago.