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Memorial Plaza. Photo by Rick Latoff / American Battle Monuments Commission.

The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., was built to honor the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during that conflict, the more than 400,000 who died, and all who supported their efforts from the homefront. But the Greatest Generation is aging rapidly, and about 1,200 World War II veterans die each day; most won’t see the memorial honoring their sacrifice.

The wall of 4,048 stars; each one represents 100 Americans who died in the war. Photo by Rick Latoff / American Battle Monuments Commission.

That seemed wrong to former Air Force Captain Earl Morse, and he came up with an idea: Send those veterans who are willing and able to the nation’s capital, free of charge. His non-profit organization, Honor Flight Network, transports World War II veterans to Washington, D.C. from 75 locations all over the country. In 2009, the organization’s fifth year of operation, Honor Flight transported nearly 36,000 veterans.

A recent Smithsonian Channel special (“Wings of Honor”) follows three World War II veterans as they travel from Kansas to Washington, D.C. to visit the memorial. The men—Lee Phelps, E.J. Novotny, and George Koogle—had vastly different wartime experiences, serving on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Saipan, but all were eager to defend their country. “All the younger people,” says Novotny, “naturally were anxious to get the hell over there and whip their butts. Can I use profanity in this?”

“Wings of Honor” is available on demand through the Smithsonian Channel. Watch a sneak peek, below.

Belka during the Sputnik 5 flight.

By some definitions, you could say that spaceflight began 50 years ago today.

On August 19, 1960, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 5 capsule containing 40 mice, two rats, a rabbit, some fruit flies, plants—and a pair of dogs, Belka (“Whitey”) and Strelka (“Little Arrow.”) They were the first living creatures to go into orbit and return safely. And they gave the Soviets confidence to send a human into space less than a year later.

You can see contemporary footage of the space dogs here, and a 2005 BBC dramatization of the Sputnik 5 launch (and a failed precursor), with a cranky Sergey Korolev overseeing the launch.

According to Chris Dubbs, author of Space Dogs: Pioneers of Space Travel, Russian space doctors were at first alarmed when TV transmissions from the Sputnik 5 capsule showed neither dog moving the slightest bit during the first three orbits.

Finally, on the fourth orbit, Belka gave a little shudder and vomited. It seemed to snap both dogs out of a trance, breaking the spell of the strange experience of being without gravity. For the rest of the flight they looked more alert.

Belka and Strelka became instant folk heroes, and in the 50 years since have inspired everything from cartoons (of the Ren & Stimpy school), to electronica/dance music to Russia’s first 3-D animated film, “Belka and Strelka, Star Dogs,” released this year in time for the anniversary.

Two of Strelka's grand-puppies, in Mrs. Kennedy's lap, August 1963. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Both dogs were “preserved” after their death, and are now on display at the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow. Strelka, though, lives on through her heirs. She had a daughter, Pushinka, who was given by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy when her family lived in the White House. Among other tricks, Pushinka learned to climb the ladder to daughter Caroline’s playhouse. She had four puppies of her own—Blackie, Butterfly, White Tip and Streaker—who were later given away.

FIFI in flight. (Photo: CAF/ Nigel Hitchman)

Just two weeks ago, the Commemorative Air Force returned its B-29 Superfortress, Fifi, to flight after six years of down time while the airplane was fitted with customized engines (maintainers had found metal shavings in the engine oil). The CAF planned to re-launch Fifi as the signature aircraft for its “Red, White & Loud Tour,” co-starring country music artist Aaron Tippin, who flies a Stearman, a J-3 Cub, and  Helio Courier in his spare time.

Enter the gremlins, and scratch one B-29—for the nonce. “Due to mechanical issues discovered during flight-testing over the weekend…Fifi will not take flight to Denver for the first show of the tour,” the CAF said in a Music City News press release yesterday. “A distributor malfunction in one of her engines resulted in pre-ignition, damaging some of the cylinders.” The CAF will sub its B-24A Liberator, Ol’ 927, at the Colorado Sport International Air Show at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport on Saturday, August 28.

The LSST: The whole sky in just three days.

Every ten years or so, the nation’s astronomers put their heads (actually committees) together to come up with a collective wish list for the projects they’d like to see funded over the next decade. Politicians tend to like this method of setting scientific priorities, as it saves them from choosing, and Congress and the White House generally try to follow the plan, like parents working down a Christmas list.

The latest of these “decadal surveys” was just released today by the National Research Council, and if it comes to pass, astronomers should have plenty of fun new tools to play with by 2020.

Topping the wish list are two multipurpose survey instruments: a $1.6 billion spacecraft called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), and a $465 million ground-based observatory, to be built in Chile, called the LSST, for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Both are good at multiple jobs, and both will address two of modern astronomy’s most pressing questions: determining the nature of “dark energy,” and finding habitable planets around other stars.

I’ve heard a number of presentations on the LSST over the years, and have always been mystified as to why the National Science Foundation, NASA, or somebody else didn’t rush out to complete it. It’s astronomy’s Everything Machine, and there are few things it won’t do. The telescope is a little over 8 meters, not the biggest in the world, but with a wide field of view. More importantly, it surveys the entire sky, with exquisite sensitivity, every three days, which is truly revolutionary. In the past, comparable surveys have taken months or years to cover the whole sky. The LSST will do that twice a week. I’ve heard it called astronomy’s Google in terms of the sheer volume of data it will produce, and in fact the information company is a partner in the project.

Among many other tasks, the LSST should be great at picking out Earth-threatening asteroids, which will stand out as streaks of light against the non-moving stellar background.

I can’t wait to see this thing built.

Read the full decadal survey report here.

Here’s Stephen Hawking, commenting on humanity’s future:

…Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

I’ve never much liked this argument. If it’s true (and I’m not sure it is) that we’re doomed to destroy ourselves because “our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts,” wouldn’t we just carry our dysfunctional habits with us to the moon and Mars? What would we gain?

Here’s another plan: Let’s work on curbing our selfishness and aggression (a Grand Challenge for 21st Century sociology?) so that the six billion of us left on Earth have a better chance of preventing/surviving a catastrophe, whether natural or self-inflicted. If the world ends, it won’t be much consolation to me (or probably to them) that 100 people survived on a moon base.