Photo: US Navy/Northrop Grumman

This morning, for the first time in history, a combat aircraft with no pilot onboard took off from an aircraft carrier at sea.

The X-47B demonstrator launched from the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Virginia at 11:18 a.m., and flew to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland.

“Today we saw a small, but significant pixel in the future picture of our Navy,” said Vice Adm. David Buss, commander of the Naval Air Forces, in a released statement.

Next up on the list of milestones — flying approaches and landings on a pitching flight deck.

Update: On May 17 the X-47B did its first touch-and-go landing on a carrier.

Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth this evening, along with Expedition 34/35 crewmates Dr. (not Major) Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko. NASA TV coverage of their departure from the International Space Station begins at 3:30.

Flora Loughead at age 24.

Their name originally was Loughead, Scottish for “lake’s head.” We know them today as the Lockheed brothers, Allan and Malcolm, who in 1912 founded what became one of the world’s biggest aerospace companies. Allan, the younger brother, had taught himself to fly two years earlier in a Curtiss pusher airplane — the kind of daring common among that pioneering generation of aviators.

For the sons of Flora Loughead, risk-taking was nothing unusual, because she herself may have been the most adventurous member of the family.

Born Flora Haines in 1855, she took the name of her second husband, John Loughead, at the age of 30, and within three years gave birth to Malcolm and Alan. She was no stay-at-home housewife, living vicariously through her kids. As Lockheed biographer Walter Boyne sums up, “She was a journalist, married three times, had five children by two husbands, worked her own mining claims, farmed thirty-five acres, wrote many articles and more than a dozen books, taught her children at home, and in general behaved in a manner that would be widely applauded today but was unheard of at the time.”

As a newspaper reporter, she covered everything from bicycle races to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and as an author she wrote both fiction and nonfiction books. You can read some of them here.

Flora wasn’t, however, the one who got her boys interested in aviation.  That was eldest son Victor, who wrote (in 1910 as Victor Lougheed), Vehicles of the Air.

Always independent and a little cheeky, Flora wrote — at a time when her future aviators were just five and two years old — a book that any modern parent can relate to: Quick Cooking: A Book of Culinary Heresies for the Busy Wives and Mothers of the Land. It was signed “By One of the Heretics.”

Malcolm (left) and Allan Lockheed, in their element. Thanks, Ma!

There was a subtext of desperation in Dennis Tito‘s plea at this week’s Humans to Mars conference in Washington, considering  he’d just spent the last few minutes dashing all hope that the U.S. government will send people to Mars any time soon.

But Tito doesn’t seem desperate. In fact, it’s amazing how cool and collected he and his fellow space pioneers sounded as they described two wildly ambitious, privately funded Mars missions: a 500-day round-trip for two (Tito’s Inspiration Mars), and an even more daring one-way trip to the surface for four pioneers (Mars One).

The backers admit that yes, they have their work cut out for them. They talk like sober space engineers, with data, viewgraphs, and a list of technical advisors.  It’ll be tough, they say, but doable.  And we’re meant to find that inspiring.

Well, you may say I’m not a dreamer — and I’m not the only one.

Consider Tito’s plan.  They’ll need to launch in 2018 to hit the launch window for their particular mission design (a swingby with no landing). Elon Musk of SpaceX, maybe the most audacious engineer of our time, took 10 years to design, build and launch unmanned cargo ships to low Earth orbit. Judging from his experience alone, I’d say there’s almost no chance Inspiration Mars will be ready in just five years.

Mars One aims to launch in 2022, but will need to start sending technology demo missions in 2016, just three years from now. Again, I have to think  it’s very, very unlikely.

Still, there’s something poignant about this business of passing the hat for space settlement. In the first two weeks of accepting applications (the registration fee varies according to country; Afghans pay just $5, while Qataris pay $73) the organization got 78,000 applicants.  Some of the applicants’ videos can be seen here.

Mars One isn’t the first company to believe they can finance a multibillion dollar space mission by selling media rights. Others thought they could do the same with trips to the International Space Station and robots on the moon.  None of it has come to pass.

The current enthusiasm for crowdsourcing space, from Astronaut Abby to Uwingu, seems driven partly by the early success of commercial ventures like SpaceX, and partly by the explosive growth of social media. It has more to do with Twitter than Apollo, but in 2013, that’s where we’re at.

An Air Force B-52 dropped the unmanned test vehicle from about 50,000 feet over the ocean off southern California, after which it flew more than 230 nautical miles in about six minutes. Top speed: Mach 5.1.

The Air Force has no immediate plans for follow-on tests. But in this Boeing promotional video, Joseph Vogel, the company’s director of hypersonics, explains the technology’s promise:

Sutter: the urge to inspire. (Photo: Boeing)

Odds are that every person reading these words has flown somewhere, at some time, on a Boeing 747. It doesn’t have a snazzy name like Dreamliner or Stratocruiser, as do other Boeing products, current and historic. But, with its characteristic fore-fuselage hump, which exists for delightfully non-aerodynamic reasons, it is probably the most recognizable airliner in the world.

Last week, the National Air and Space Museum recognized the man who led the design of the 747 with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Joe Sutter, who retired in 1986 after more than 40 years at Boeing, helped design six of the company’s 7×7 series of airliners. Sutter took the occasion as an opportunity to urge educators to inspire the youngest students in schools to pursue careers in the areas of engineering, math, and science so that, like him, “they can stand back and see the results of their efforts, and feel a sense of accomplishment.” As the 747 project engineer, Sutter led a team of 4,500, so he knows a thing or two about leadership. During his remarks, he told the audience about a leader who had inspired him: Theodore Roosevelt. Here’s what he had to say:

“I first heard of [Theodore Roosevelt] because he was leading a group of cavalry during the Spanish-American War. He got on his white charger and gave a resounding cheer and told his people to follow him. And his charge up San Juan Hill was so impressive that the opposition dropped their guns and fled. As a young man, I had the impression that he won that war all by himself. Roosevelt’s actions helped me believe I could do something worthwhile as well.”

In his book 747, Sutter reveals the hard-fought conflicts and company politics that his team had to overcome to get the 747 into production. He ended his acceptance speech with this quote from Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither defeat nor victory.”

Herschel detects water in Jupiter's stratosphere. Image: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al.; Jupiter image: NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University)

The Herschel Space Telescope was never meant for hot astronomy topics. It was meant for the cool ones. The European Space Agency spacecraft officially ended its observations yesterday when the last of its liquid helium, used to keep the telescope’s temperature close to absolute zero, was exhausted after three years of operation.

Herschel was launched in 2009 and spent its mission orbiting at L2, one of five Lagrangian points in the Earth-Sun system that are gravitationally stable. L2 is nearly a million miles farther from the sun than Earth is — ESA’s Planck Space Telescope, among others, is already stationed there, and it’s the future location of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. That far from the Sun is an ideal place to look at cool objects.

Observing in a broad spectral range from the far infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, Herschel could study dim objects, like asteroids in the Kuiper belt at the edge of our solar system, or debris disks where planets are forming around other stars. It also saw red-shifted light from early and active star-forming galaxies. Herschel hunted for water around the universe, finding ice particles heated by ultraviolet light from stars in many protoplanetary disks, and discovering that nearly all the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere was brought to the planet by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

Herschel had the largest infrared mirror ever launched into space — at 3.5 meters in diameter, it’s more than a meter bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s. (JWST’s mirror, however, will be almost twice as big as Herschel’s.) Scientists are still reviewing data from the space observatory, so even though the spacecraft has gone dead, discoveries will likely still be made. Indeed, astronomers are hoping that a brand new ground-based observatory can leapfrog off of Herschel’s contributions in studying the “cool” universe: ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, began operating earlier this year and should be fully operational in September. Combining their data should tell us much about the early universe and galaxy formation.

Photo: WikiCommons.

They’re small, secretive, nocturnal, and look creepy hanging upside down in caves. And at one point during World War II, they were recruited as potential killing machines.

Yep, bats as weapons of mass destruction.

“A plan to turn millions of bats into suicide bombers bearing tiny napalm time bombs was the most spectacular of the special projects at Louis Fieser’s Harvard laboratory,” writes Robert M. Neer in his new book, Napalm: An American Biography.

The project was the brainchild of Lytle Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist with a passionate hatred of the misunderstood Chiroptera.

The “lowest form of life is the BAT, associated in history with the underworld and regions of darkness and evil,” Adams wrote in a 1942 memo to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Until now reasons for its creation have remained unexplained. As I vision it the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries, tunnels and caverns were placed there by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare to desecrate our way of life.”

Seems a tad harsh, no?

Oops: The accidental incineration of Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Field, New Mexico, by bats armed with napalm bombs. Photo: U.S. Air Force.

The bats were to be loaded with a tiny (17.5 gram) napalm bomb, stuffed into a North American B-25, and flown over Japan. Upon reaching the target, 26,000 angry bats would be tossed out of the aircraft (they had parachutes), and would land upon highly flammable Japanese houses.

A test run over Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Field, New Mexico, with bats bearing dummy bombs went surprisingly well.

Fieser and his team, however, wanted to have the test filmed, so a second trial was set, using six bats with armed bombs.

Unexpectedly, the bats took off, and shortly after, the barracks burst into flames. “Flames…jumped from building to building,” writes Neer. “Many structures lay in ashes.”

“Unfortunately,” he writes, “to preserve secrecy…the team had deemed fire equipment unnecessary.” In a masterpiece of understatement, Fieser summed up the experiment: “We made a little mistake out there.”

And that was the end of the bomber bats.

Eight flight attendants pose beside a Boeing Air Transport Boeing Model 80A on the ground; circa 1930. Left to right: Jessie Carter, Cornelia Peterman, Ellen Church, Inez Keller, Alva Johnson, Margaret Arnott, Ellis Crawford, and Harriet Fry. Photograph courtesy NASM.

When the DC-3 arrived six years later, Vantoch writes, passenger miles increased 600 percent between 1931 and 1941. With the DC-3, “the airline industry began to focus on passenger service and the stewardess was catapulted to new importance,” and the number of flight attendants rose from below 400 to 1,000.

American Airline stewardesses pose in front of a Douglas DC-3. Photograph courtesy NASM.

By the mid-1940s, “stewardess candidates had to be twenty-one to twenty-eight years old,” writes Vantoch, “unmarried, 5’3″ to 5’6″ tall, no more than 125 pounds, with good posture and an ‘attractive appearance,’ and preferably with some college education.” (The nursing requirement had been dropped because nurses were required for the war effort and could not be spared for airline service.) “Stewardess training was also arduous,” notes Vantoch, “with strict rules, fifty subjects (including flight physics, emergency procedures, radio navigation, and meteorology), and a series of intense exams.”

A Frontier Airlines stewardess checks her uniform before going on duty. Photograph courtesy NASM.

The transformation of the stewardess from all-American girl next door to a sexier image, was largely the work of the Burnett advertising agency, which won the United account in 1965, and Mary Wells, the advertising director of Braniff Airlines. Leo Burnett’s team realized that young consumers were an emerging market—and appropriating aspects of the 1960s counter-culture “could help market United to older Americans who still wanted to feel young and hip.” At the same time that the Burnett agency was struggling with its campaign, Branniff kicked off its “Air Strip” television ad, in which a stewardess slowly removed pieces of her Pucci uniform during the flight. Shortly after, United’s ads promised consumers that stewardesses would “go all out to please you!” The sexual revolution had infiltrated the airlines, and other carriers soon modified their images as well.

PSA, "The World's Friendliest Airline." Photograph courtesy cruiselinehistory.com.

Crashed B-24 in Papua New Guinea. Photograph by Dietmar Eckell.

German photographer Dietmar Eckell is drawn to abandoned objects: neglected railroad tracks, stranded ships, detritus from past Olympic Games. His latest project, titled Happy End, documents aircraft wreckage—but only from accidents where everyone on board survived.

The photograph above, the last image in the series, shows a B-24 that crashed in Papua New Guinea during World War II. “I wanted a warbird in the jungle with a miracle story,” Eckell wrote in an email, “and always loved the stories of the Pacific wrecks, so I started looking in Papua New Guinea.” According to his information, all nine crew members on board survived the crash.

This Douglas C-47 made a forced landing in Canada in 1950 during a rescue mission for a C-54. Photograph by Dietmar Eckell.

The Douglas C-47 above was the first aircraft Eckell documented during the two-year project. “I’ve been there [Yukon Territory, Canada] twice already, and next time I want to go back in February, as the crash happened in February 1950. The pilot walked all the way to the Alaskan Highway to get help.”

Eckell asks local pilots to help pinpoint exact locations and provide story details, and he searches for information in local archives. “I [was originally] inspired by paintings of shipwrecks in the romantic period,” he writes. “But soon I got hooked on these planes and stories, and it was like a pilgrimage to ‘wonders’ around the world.”

Eckell plans to self-publish Happy End in June; read about his crowdfunding efforts at PetaPixel. Or see more images at Eckell’s Web site.

Flying at last: An AJ26/NK-33 engine gets hoisted into place. (Aerojet)

There were celebrations all around at Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday, as the new Antares rocket built by Orbital Sciences launched successfully on its first test flight.

There may have been some applause in Russia, too. Antares uses Aerojet AJ26/NK-33 liquid kerosene rocket engines originally built for the Soviet Union’s canceled N-1 moon rocket in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After being warehoused for 20 years, the engines were purchased by American companies and modified. On Sunday they finally made it to space, powering the Antares first stage.

Antares is now scheduled to launch Orbital’s Cygnus cargo vehicle on its first trip to the International Space Station this summer.  Meanwhile, Russia is looking at using the NK-33 on future Soyuz rockets.

A replay of the Antares launch for those who missed it:

Artist's conception of Kepler-62f, which may, according to theory, have a solid surface and liquid water. (Art: NASA)

The Kepler team’s announcement of the smallest, most Earthlike planets yet discovered in a star’s habitable zone naturally got SETI-ologists wondering whether alien civilizations might be broadcasting from Kepler-62e or -62f.

It turns out that one SETI group has already listened for signals.

Two years ago, a team led by Andrew Siemion of the University of California at Berkeley trained the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia on 86 selected “Kepler objects of interest” — confirmed or suspected planets found by NASA’s orbiting telescope since its launch in 2009. The targets were chosen based on several criteria: if the planets were within a specific mild temperature range, or if they were just a little bigger than Earth and relatively far from their host star, or if the star had five or more candidate planets. One of the 86 stars on the list was an orange dwarf designated KOI 701, now better known as Kepler-62, home to the planetary system announced yesterday.

For each of the stars, the Green Bank telescope searched the entire frequency range between 1.1 and 1.9 gigahertz, listening for “narrow-band” signals no more than a few hertz wide, which, according to a paper by Siemion and his colleagues in The Astrophysical Journal, are, “as far as we know, an unmistakable indicator of engineering by an intelligent civilization.”  Other SETI searches have targeted Kepler candidate planets, but the Green Bank search between February and April 2011 was the most sensitive yet.

Alas, “no signals of extraerrestrial origin were found” for KOI 701 or any of the other 85 targets, report the scientists. That’s not a surprising result in SETI, where absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So the search will continue. Having looked for narrow-band signals, the next step, says Siemion, is to hunt for other patterns in the data that would be harder to detect. Within the next couple of months, he and his colleagues plan to add their Kepler data to the SETI@Home archive, so that volunteers around the world can use their own computers to help crunch the numbers and look for signals.

Down the line, he sees other opportunities to tune in to the Kepler-62 planets. One scenario for possible alien transmissions is that extraterrestrial civilizations would use radio to communicate from one planet to another — if, like us, they’ve begun exploring their own solar system. Because we see the Kepler-62 system more or less edge-on, the planets will regularly line up with each other from our point of view, so that we can search at radio or even optical wavelengths for a beam directed from one planet to another. The next such conjunction of Kepler 62e and 62f happens on July 30.

If they're talking from one planet to another in the Kepler-62 system, we could listen in. (Courtesy Andrew Siemion)

“The Kepler planets are so exciting,” says Siemion, not just in themselves (although at 1,200 light years away, they’re too distant to explore in detail), but because they herald a new era of studying planets we know to be Earthlike in size and composition. He’s looking forward to the launch of TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in 2017. While Kepler’s job is to collect statistics about how common planets are around distant stars, TESS will hunt for Earthlike worlds in our own celestial neighborhood — 10 or 15 light years away. That’s close enough, says Siemion, where SETI searches could pick up FM radio and television transmissions of the kind now leaking out from Earth every day.

The airplane in question (Photo: Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome)

While meandering around aviation web sites, I came across an item that said the Blériot XI at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate New York might have been the one from which Harriet Quimby and a passenger fell to their deaths in 1912. Could this be true, or is it another aviation urban legend?

Photo and illustrations editor Caroline Sheen put the question to a couple of knowledgeable folks. Says Andrew King, once an Old Rhinebeck pilot and one of the most experienced fliers of early aircraft: “Harriet was killed in a two-seater, and the Rhinebeck one is a smaller one-seater. I think it is thought to have been at the [1912] Boston meet though, so that might be where the rumor started.”

And from early aircraft photographer Gilles Auliard, who has been shooting at Old Rhinebeck since 1988: “The Old Rhinebeck Blériot (c/n 56) was found in Lacomia, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s and is reputed to have participated in the Squantum meet, or so [Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome founder] Cole Palen told me. According to the Blériot production list, it was completed in 1909 (and it actually makes sense, as Blériot was turning out models XI like pancakes).

“Harriet Quimby was flying a brand new Blériot XI at the meet, which would imply a 1912 building date, and it was reported as a two-seater version (even though this is also questionable as pictures of the meet show her in a single-seater).

“Three years of flying in the early 1900s was long time. The life expectancy of an airplane was computed in months, not in years (even though they could be repaired and modified at will to reappear later).

“It also remains to be seen if Quimby bought a French-made Blériot or a U.S.-made copy or licensed version, as there was a plethora of authorized/unauthorized manufacturers.

“If one could determine that it was a U.S.-built machine, this would be the end of the controversy.”

So, the verdict: likely an urban legend.

Astronauts head out to meet up with an asteroid, somewhere beyond the Moon, ca. 2021. (NASA artist's conception)

This week NASA announced plans to capture a small asteroid in 2019 and bring it back to the vicinity of the Moon for later study by astronauts. It’s a good idea, for several reasons.

It’s of real importance to society.

The asteroid threat is sometimes overhyped, and it’s no wonder politicians don’t consider it an emergency when the last Extinction Level Event (to borrow a term from Deep Impact) happened 64 million years ago. Still, the fireball over Chelyabinsk in February demonstrated that even a small space rock can do damage, and hinted at even scarier scenarios. The rock that NASA plans to retrieve would be just half the size of the 60-foot Chelyabinsk object, small enough to burn up harmlessly if it entered our atmosphere. But learning to deflect or move even a mini-asteroid should give us valuable experience.

The 2012 DA14 asteroid that bypassed Earth last February compared to the (smaller) object that entered the atmosphere over Russia on the same day. The rock to be retrieved by NASA would be half the size of the smaller asteroid. (Art by Michael Carroll, courtesy B612 Foundation)

Public support for asteroid research is a no-brainer, yet NASA has had trouble allocating even a few million dollars a year (in an $18 billion budget) for a comprehensive search using a modest, space-based telescope. This new mission would help get the hunt started, because it requires an inventory of even smaller objects than we’ve tracked in the past.

Meanwhile, NASA still struggles to find a compelling destination for future astronauts that will sell with the general public. Expeditions to Mars or setting up an outpost on the Moon are fascinating projects, but hardly essential, and many taxpayers still consider them frivolous. Understanding asteroids and learning how to alter their course, on the other hand, are critical to humanity’s ultimate survival.

It advances space technology.

A mission that sounds straightforward, and is expected to cost no more than NASA’s latest Mars rover, would nonetheless require several new technologies that could also be applied to other projects. Solar electric engines for the unmanned tug that retrieves the asteroid can be used on future planetary spacecraft. Robotic tools for snagging an “uncooperative” target like a tumbling asteroid might also be used to clean up space debris or refuel satellites in orbit. After the rock is retrieved, astronauts will have to learn to live and work in what’s called cislunar space, something they’ve never done. In short, there’s plenty of cool and useful technology in an asteroid retrieval mission.

It sends astronauts farther than they’ve ever gone.

Does human spaceflight have a future?  In 2013, the answer is not obvious. The technologies of robotics and telepresence are advancing far faster than rockets and space capsules, which are still spinning off ideas developed in the 1950s. Those who doubt that humans will ever be content to explore deep space virtually, as opposed to going there in person, should consider Skype and Oculus Rift. Behaviors deeply embedded in human culture are changing before our eyes. Military forces are rapidly evolving from a centuries-old model of flesh-and-blood warriors facing off on battlefields to drones fighting drones. Why should space exploration be any different?

This may not, in fact, be the last hurrah for old-school (human) astronauts. But choosing a just-over-the-horizon destination like the lunar far side, while reviving some of the old Apollo mojo, will help us decide whether to continue sending people farther out into the solar system.

It encourages cooperation.

Groups including the B612 Foundation already are working to characterize the threat of larger incoming asteroids (“city killers” upwards of 100 feet in size), while others have announced plans to mine smaller rocks. NASA might be able to leverage these private ventures to keep its own costs down and encourage more players in the space business.

Within the agency itself, an asteroid retrieval mission would demand closer collaboration between the astronaut program and the science side of the house than at any time since Apollo. Meanwhile, partners in the International Space Station, who’ve shown only polite interest in the Moon or Mars, might be more willing to join in a smaller-scale mission with obvious benefit to all nations.

It’s doable.

Maybe the biggest advantage of all.

Every so often, a U.S. President (Bushes 41 and 43 most recently) proposes a grandiose go-to-the-Moon or –Mars scheme, which quickly peters out when everyone realizes, once again, that it costs way too much. Space advocates with long memories might be forgiven if they no longer expect Charlie Brown to kick the football.

Today the economic situation is worse than at any time in the space age. With millions unemployed and uninsured, and with public and private debt skyrocketing, no politician is about to suggest an expensive mission to the moon or Mars. Sorry, that’s not strictly true. Those representing districts with NASA centers will.  But don’t expect many others to join them.

That leaves NASA building a new rocket (the Space Launch System) and new vehicle (Orion), with no obvious place to go. Space agency managers rightly asked themselves what they could realistically do with the tools and money on hand, in a relatively short time. And the asteroid retrieval mission is what they came up with.

Some will say that grabbing a space rock – a tiny one at that – is not ambitious enough, not worthy of the nation that launched Apollo. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” so this argument goes. Maybe. But while Robert Browning’s advice may be good for an artist, it can lead to frustration and failure for engineers and accountants.

So here’s a more pertinent line from the same poem: “Less is more.”

Let’s do something we can actually accomplish. And let’s get on with it.

Entrance to the new Time and Navigation exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum

You’re going to need a clock. That’s what the National Air and Space Museum wants to get across to visitors with its new permanent exhibit, Time and Navigation, opening tomorrow.

“If you want to know where you are, or if you want to know where you’re going, you need a reliable clock,” said Carlene Stephens, a curator at the National Museum of American History, which houses the Smithsonian’s collection of clocks and contributed to the exhibit. Appropriately, visitors enter the exhibit by walking under a beautiful blue and gold clock, in the “spirit of the early and truly magnificent European clocks,” says exhibit designer Heidi Eitel. She wanted to include the automaton clock that comes to life every quarter hour to tell “the story of when people began sharing time.”

The exhibit takes you through three eras, starting with Navigating at Sea, when sailors first used sextants and star charts to find their way across vast oceans. Though ships have had navigators since the 1600s, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that they had marine chronometers that kept reliable time at sea and allowed navigation with any precision. Galileo’s pendulum clock and an interactive 19th-century ship’s sextant that lets visitors navigate by the stars are highlights.

Next, the exhibit takes flight. Even aviation heros like Charles Lindbergh got lost before Navy Lieutenant Commander P.V.H. Weems developed air navigation techniques. Overhead, visitors can see the Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae, which Wiley Post and famed navigator Harold Gatty flew around the world in 1931 in just eight days — a feat that could not have been accomplished without precise location-determining skills.

The Lockheed Vega "Winnie Mae," now on display in the Time and Navigation exhibit, was flown around the world in 1931 in just eight days. Photo by Dane Penland, National Air and Space Museum

In the third and final era, navigation gets three-dimensional as it moves into space. Throughout this section of the exhibit are star charts where Earth becomes just another potential destination on the map. Our education on space navigation starts with the story of NASA’s nine Ranger spacecraft, notorious for their failures to reach the moon, including two that completely missed the mark. But astronauts eventually made it to the surface, and visitors can see the Apollo sextant and space shuttle star tracker here. “When we go back into deep space,” said curator Andrew Johnston, “it’ll be very interesting to see how far we’ve come with navigation.” With the technology available today, the exhibit explains, spacecraft missions in 2012 were 100,000 times more accurate than they were in the 1960s.

Finally, the exhibit shows us how we navigate today. Atomic clocks (one is on view in case you need to set your watch) that keep time to three billionths of a second, GPS satellites that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and smartphones that crunch all sorts of data have replaced chronometers and sextants and bulky books of charts. In fact, navigation today doesn’t even need people: Stanford’s driverless-car Stanley is also on display. It won DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge by navigating an off-road 132-mile race. But proving its necessity in our everyday modern lives, Time and Navigation ends with stories from today — a farmer, a fireman and a student explain how their livelihoods are affected by the technology developed since the first sailor located the North Star.