Col. Chris Cook flies at 71,000 feet over California in a U-2 Dragon Lady during a recent mission. Colonel Cook is the 412th Operations Group commander at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. (Courtesy photo/Col. Chris Cook)
Category: aviation
USAF Thunderbirds 
Los Angeles County Air Show
The USAF Thunderbirds demonstration team performed at General William J. Fox Airfield, Lancaster CA over the weekend.
USAF Thunderbirds 
Photo: AV Media photojournalist Melinda Rodriguez
Cam Martin: Speaking on NASA and Art
Public · Art · Hosted by Lancaster Museum of Art and History – MOAH
September 18th at 2 pm in the Main Gallery for a special guest talk. Cam Martin from the NASA Armstrong Research Center hosted a special Curator’s Talk on the current exhibition of NASA Flight Research: Probing the Sky as part of Made in America.
Space Tourism in the Mojave Desert
John Makely | NBC News
Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKniteTwo mothership with SpaceShipTwo aboard approaches lift-off speed for a powered test flight at the Mojave Air and Space Port.
“MOJAVE, Calif.—The Mojave Desert is where the Right Stuff was born. It’s where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with the X-1 rocket plane in 1947. It’s where other test pilots earned their astronaut wings in the X-15 during the ’60s.
Now the Right Stuff is being born again in Mojave. But it’s an open question whether that renewed spirit of rocket-powered flight will grow up here—or take root someplace else, as it did in the 1960s.
This time, the rockets being tested in the desert aren’t secret military projects. They’re commercial ventures, focused on bringing the thrill of outer space to the masses and turning a profit.
“As a child, I read about some of the things that happened… the early X-1 flights, the whole X-series…I guess I thought that was over and gone with, and probably wouldn’t be seen again,” said David Mackay, a 56-year-old veteran aviator who’s now the chief pilot for one of those ventures, Virgin Galactic. “And yet, here we are with a very similar system, an air-launched spaceship.” (Full story at CNBC.com)
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