AirSpaceMag.com

Walter Soplata with an F2G Corsair. (Photo courtesy Wally Soplata)

Walter Soplata, a carpenter who saved numerous World War II aircraft and engines from the cutting torch and amassed a legendary collection on his Ohio property, died on Friday, November 5, at age 87. His son, Wally, wrote about his father in the November 2007 issue of Air & Space. Today, he writes: “Like Orville and Wilbur inventing the airplane, Jimmy Doolittle leading B-25s off the deck of the Hornet, or Burt Rutan sending a homebuilt into space, Dad’s vision was full of risks and involved thinking far outside the box. Who else would haul an F7U Cutlass by stuffing it in an old school bus, or use the family Suburban to bring home a pair of B-25s? I sometimes see Dad as a poor man’s version of Howard Hughes: a visionary, yet also a man chained down by an obsession. Unusual in many ways, it was Dad’s fearlessness of being different that enabled him to save the many historic aircraft that he did.”

It’s no secret that the astronaut corps today, with an average age between 47 and 48, is a bit older than the in-their-primers of Mercury and Gemini. And eyesight, it turns out, is one measure of age. Approximately 80 percent of the current astronaut corps wears eye correction (i.e. glasses or contact lenses). So on any given shuttle flight, a few crew members typically take along eye correction for presbyopia, the far-sightedness that comes from the aging and hardening of the optic lens, making it difficult to read manuals, instruments, or anything else at close range (picture your dad holding a letter at arm’s length and frowning). As long as the astronauts’ vision is correctable to 20/20, they’re allowed to fly. Even Apollo veteran John Young took his reading glasses along on STS-1.

Young could see Columbia's dials in 1981 at age 50...with reading glasses. Photo: NASA

On STS-133, two of the crew who use glasses will try out a new type of spectacles called Superfocus lenses, that offer improved vision for working in tight quarters. And they’ll take along two more pairs for people on the International Space Station. NASA isn’t saying who needs them and who doesn’t.

“The bottom line is that with a bifocal [and reading glasses] there are limitations,” says Dr. C. Robert Gibson, NASA’s in-house optometrist for the astronauts. “They’re okay for reading and looking at a distance, but they don’t allow you to look overhead without having to throw your head way back, looking through the reading portion. When you’re in a spacecraft environment, you’re having to look overhead at panels, different viewing angles, different focal lengths. And if you’re presbyopic, that can be quite challenging.”

A bespectacled Doug Wheelock prepares for a spacewalk with ordinary glasses on August 16, 2010 on the International Space Station. Photo: NASA.

The new glasses, developed by Superfocus, LLC, of Van Nuys, California, have a hard front lens that might or might not have the prescription you need for distance viewing; then a second, flexible lens behind it. Between the two lies a filtered silicone oil analogous to the fluid injected into the eyeball during retinal surgery to prevent the eye from collapsing. By pushing a tiny slider button across the top of the bridge between the lenses, you can adjust the bulge of the flexible lens and change the focal length.

Liquid Lookers: The Superfocus lenses and frames will be in orbit in a few weeks. Photo: Courtesy, Superfocus, LLC

Gibson stumbled across the glasses reading a professional journal last year. “I  thought, Wow, these sound pretty interesting. These would be ideal for spaceflight. The optics of that silicone are just incredible. Better than any optics I’ve ever seen in a pair of glasses, personally. And I wear glasses. There’s just no distortion. All bifocals and progressive lenses have a certain amount of inherent distortion. If you’re looking for something to give you your best, widest field of view, without having to look in all directions, whether you’re looking overhead, to the side, whatever, they’re pretty awesome.” NASA’s not officially endorsing them in any way, he says. They’ve simply approved a trial on shuttle and station.

A drawback is that they’re heavier than other glasses—oh, never mind, it’s a non-issue in zero gravity.

If you’d care to order a pair directly from the company’s web site, you’ll experience a little gravity in the price tag: around $700. But hey, for perfect, adjustable vision on the fly, who’s counting?

It’s not often that you get to see a Boeing C-17 Globemaster make a flyover down a palm-tree-lined street, but it happened one recent Veterans Day in Long Beach, California. Enjoy. Gotta love the car alarm going off in the background at the end of the video—no flyover’s complete without one.

Photo: Huang Jingwen / Xinhua

What impresses me most about the new photos of the moon taken by the Chinese Chang’e-2 orbiter is not their beauty (although they are pretty) nor their sharpness (NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returns higher resolution images). It’s the fact that they were unveiled by Premier Wen Jiabao (left).

I can’t think of an occasion where a U.S. head of state showed that much interest in a purely scientific (unmanned) space mission. The closest thing I could find after a quick search is this 1965 shot of Lyndon Johnson being shown photos from the Mariner 4 Mars probe, two weeks after the flyby.

More Chang’e-2 photos are at this Chinese-language page at the China National Space Administration. Here’s a nice one:

The U.S. Air Force recently announced its new motto: “Aim High…Fly-Fight-Win,” which generals chose out of five contenders suggested by airmen and the general public: Fly Fight Win, Aim High, Above and Beyond, Air Power, and Wings of Freedom.

This from the same people who named the Boeing C-17 “Globemaster III” and the Lockheed Martin F-35 “Lightning II.” The Air Force Times has been reporting on the campaign since August, and in one follow-up noted “You sent in nearly 300 suggestions: old recruiting slogans, a few unfit to print, a fair share of Latin phrases and new acronyms.”

To be sure, nothing tops the Marine Corps’ “Semper Fidelis.” But simply combining two stand-alone mottos is wishy-washy, akin to “Air Force: Et cetera.”