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We’ll find out soon enough. After four months on the ground, the F-22 Raptor was cleared by the U.S. Air Force to resume operations this week. In May, the fleet was grounded after 12 incidents over three years of pilots suffering hypoxia-like symptoms.  After an investigation of the Raptor’s life-support systems, the Air Force declared that it has enough information to begin flying again, but gave no definitive explanation of the root problem or whether it’s been fixed.

F-22 Raptor. Credit: U.S. Air Force

According to a release, “We now have enough insight from recent studies and investigations that a return to flight is prudent and appropriate,” Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said. “We’re managing the risks with our aircrews, and we’re continuing to study the F-22′s oxygen systems and collect data to improve its performance.”

Each of the 170 stealth fighters will be extensively inspected and, as the pilots retrain on the aircraft they’ve been out of for 142 days, will use additional protective gear and undergo physiological tests to monitor the situation.

Moon hoax believers contend that NASA’s Apollo lunar landings were elaborately orchestrated lies, and that men never walked on the moon. Apollo 18, a film that opened this month, proposes the opposite: that NASA launched a manned lunar mission the public has no knowledge of—until now.

The Apollo program was canceled in 1970, and the last mission of the series, Apollo 17, launched on December 7, 1972. Apollo 18 sells itself as a documentary drawn from real footage shot during a secret—and final—manned moon mission. But the illusion is ruined by the credits that roll at the end of the film, as well as a statement that all characters are fictional.

Taken as a work of pseudo-history, Apollo 18 gets many things right. Good special effects simulate the grainy black-and-white footage from real Apollo missions. And the film is nicely cast, with Lloyd Owen as mission commander Nate Walker and Warren Christie as lunar module pilot Ben Anderson. Both men capture the swagger and unflappability of military aviators turned astronauts (their characters are U.S. Navy pilots).

The weakness of Apollo 18 is its lack of originality. The moon’s real secret, as it turns out, (plot spoiler ahead) is that the rocks themselves are extraterrestrial life forms, who like to invade human hosts. Unfortunately, we’ve seen scarier parasitic aliens before, most notably in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien.

The Apollo 11 crew in quarantine, after their return from the moon in 1969.

Before Apollo 11 (the first manned moon landing) in July 1969, there were a lot of Earthly concerns about the planet being contaminated by a lunar pathogen picked up by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In a book just published by NASA, When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA’s Planetary Protection Programs, author Michael Meltzer devotes a chapter to examining the years of committee meetings and painstaking plans on how to prevent “back contamination.” Items that had come into contact with the  Apollo 11 crew—clothing, film canisters, even the command module—had to be sanitized. Lunar samples were quarantined until it was determined they did not pose any risk of contamination. The astronauts themselves had to chill for a few weeks in the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a customized trailer now on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia.

In a scene that seems almost comical today, Meltzer details the care taken to protect Richard M. Nixon when he visited the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, where the Apollo 11 crew was taken after their command module landed in the Pacific: “Only after the astronauts were safely sealed in the airtight Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) and the Hornet’s deck disinfected did NASA allow President Richard Nixon…to approach the large window at the rear of the MQF to give his congratulations. During the transfer of astronauts, President Nixon had been kept far away, a helicopter waiting to fly [him] off the ship should any leaks be detected in the MQF.”

Scientists now know that the surface of the moon is too sterile to support life, but NASA had to play it safe. After Apollo 14, however, the sanitizing and quarantining protocols were suspended.

At the end of Apollo 18, the filmmakers note that more than 840 pounds of lunar samples were returned to Earth, some of which were given to foreign dignitaries as gifts and were stolen and now unaccounted for. Implying what, exactly? That there’s still a threat of moon rocks going alien on us? Don’t tell that to the hundreds of people who daily touch a moon rock on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

What’s a better way to get a new view of a space shuttle launch than using a “whole-sky lens”? Better known as a fisheye lens, videographer Dennis Biela and his crew used it to catch Atlantis rising swiftly into the Florida sky on its final launch in July, before droplets from the steam clouds obscure the view.

You might already be familiar with some of Biela’s team’s work, including the 360-degree view of Atlantis‘ flight deck that’s been making its way around the internet for the past few months. Click over this way for a large series taken around Kennedy Space Center in the days around the last launch; navigate through by clicking on the series of boxes at the bottom left.

This summer the X-47B unmanned combat aircraft made its first arrested landing on the USS Eisenhower. Well, actually it was an F/A-18D Hornet (left) operating as a surrogate, using the software and avionics of the X-47B. And a pilot was in the cockpit, or, in Navy parlance, “in the loop.”  Off-camera and well off-ship, a less glamorous King Air fitted with the same control system set down smoothly on a land-based runway.

Both landings brought the Navy a step closer to meeting its mission goal of an “autonomous, low-observable, relevant unmanned aircraft.” The surrogate tests pose lower risk than landing a real X-47B without prior sea trials, and at far lower cost.

Today’s carrier approaches are flown manually by a pilot using visual cues and a radio dispatch, usually sent from the Landing Signal Officer (LSO) on deck. Most of the information is relayed by voice, the rest by handheld flags, which can introduce both delay and errors. The purpose of the UCAS-D (Unmanned Combat Air System-Demonstration) program is to digitize all communications and navigation data, while minimizing the new hardware and training requirements for the awkward human component.

Both the aircraft and the ship’s control tower will use GPS navigation. Eventually the carrier’s LSO will fold up his flags and transmit all instructions via a digital network integrated with the primary flight control tower on deck. Digital control will also reach the ship’s ready room below, which may have no pilots in the traditional sense.

The landing signal officer, soon to be disconnected

Strange days for NASA’s astronauts. Their numbers are down—from a peak of 150 in 2000 to just over 60 today. And they just lost their main vehicle, the space shuttle. For a few years, they’ll be passengers on somebody else’s spaceship, which on some level must rankle.

My other car was a shuttle: The STS-134 astronauts arrive in Florida in T-38s before their launch last April.

It seems heartless, then, to suggest that the astronauts’ cherished T-38Ns—the sporty, two-seater training jets they use to keep their piloting skills sharp and their commute from Houston to Cape Canaveral short—should be yanked away too. Nobody has proposed that directly, or at least publicly. But eyebrows have been raised. Do the astronauts really need all those T-38s (NASA maintains a fleet of 21, which will soon drop to 16) when nobody will be doing much piloting in the near future?

The answer, in a National Research Council report on the astronaut corps published this week, is yes. It turns out that T-38s serve more of a purpose than just making the astronauts look cool when they arrive in Florida before a launch. From the report:

It is important to emphasize that SFRT [spaceflight readiness training] is not just about flying the T-38N as the pilot in command. Instead, it is about developing the skills and ability to work together in an environment that is fast-paced, physically stressful, and carries potentially severe penalties for failure. SFRT involves both the pilot in command of the aircraft and the person in the back seat, dividing responsibilities. For example, the backseat flyer frequently handles navigation, communications, and crew resource management duties during flight and must coordinate with the pilot, who is actually flying the aircraft. Hands-on control of the aircraft by backseaters is a big part of SFRT. SFRT is useful for many aspects of spaceflight⎯not only for operation of a spacecraft such as Soyuz, but also for operations onboard the International Space Station….Given the current investment in the existing T-38N fleet, in the near term that fleet is the most cost-effective means for providing SFRT.

There’s more good news for astronauts in the report. The NRC endorses NASA’s plan for keeping the corps at about 60, which may seem high when only two Americans typically are on the space station at any one time. But when you consider, as the report does, all of the constraints on crew readiness, from medical issues to training requirements (it takes longer to train for a space station mission than for a shuttle flight), 60 people seems about right. If anything, the NRC panel says, it’s a little thin. NASA plans to hire 15 more astronauts in the next five years, with selections in 2012 and 2014.