On the frontier: Flight research at Dryden 1946-1981

The history of flight research at the NASA Hugh L. Dryden Flight Research Center is recounted. The period of emerging supersonic flight technology (1944 to 1959) is reviewed along with the era of flight outside the Earth's atmosphere (1959 to 1981). Specific projects such as the X-15, Gemini, Apollo, and the space shuttle are addressed. The flight chronologies of various aircraft and spacecraft are given

This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury

When Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, it charged NASA with the responsibility "to contribute materially to . . . the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space" and "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof." NASA wisely interpreted this mandate to include responsibility for documenting the epochal progress of which it is the focus. The result has been the development of a historical program by NASA as unprecedented as the task of extending man's mobility beyond his planet. This volume is not only NASA's accounting of its obligation to disseminate information to our current generation of Americans. It also fulfills, as do all of NASA's future-oriented scientific-technological activities, the further obligation to document the present as the heritage of the future. The wide-ranging NASA history program includes chronicles of day-to-day space activities; specialized studies of particular fields within space science and technology; accounts of NASA's efforts in organization and management, where its innovations, while less known to the public than its more spectacular space shots, have also been of great significance; narratives of the growth and expansion of the space centers throughout the country, which represent in microcosm many aspects of NASA's total effort; program histories, tracing the successes- and failures- of the various projects that mark man's progress into the Space Age; and a history of NASA itself, incorporating in general terms the major problems and challenges, and the responses thereto, of our entire civilian space effort. The volume presented here is a program history, the first in a series telling of NASA's pioneering steps into the Space Age. It deals with the first American manned-spaceflight program: Project Mercury. Although some academicians might protest that this is "official" history, it is official only in the fact that it has been prepared and published with the support and cooperation of NASA. It is not "official" history in the sense of presenting a point of view supposedly that of NASA officialdom-if anyone could determine what the "point of view" of such a complex organism might be. Certainly, the authors were allowed to pursue their task with the fullest freedom and in accordance with the highest scholarly standards of the history profession

Raymond Collishaw, the Royal Air Force and the Western Desert Campaign, 1940-1941

This dissertation examines the origins of the British system of tactical air support which significantly contributed to the defeat of Germany during the Second World War. Poor relations between the Royal Air Force and Army early in the war hindered the success of operations. The RAF air campaign during Operation Compass demonstrated the fundamental tenets of the formal Allied tactical air doctrine that would emerge later in the war. The central figure was Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw who directed his small force to overwhelm the Italian air force and dislocate enemy logistics to make a substantial contribution to the first major British victory of the war. Collishawâ s career prepared him well for this campaign. Known primarily as a Great War ace, he was also one of the first specialists in close air support during the Hundred Days campaign. After the war he fought campaigns in South Russia and Mesopotamia, served aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, policed riots in Palestine and deployed to Sudan during the Abyssinian crisis. This experience primed him for senior command and taught him much about the application of air power, especially how to work effectively with the Army and the Royal Navy. The failure of Operation Battleaxe in June 1941, fought according to Army doctrine, led Prime Minister Winston Churchill to consider the higher level direction of future air campaigns. He identified and codified the elements of a successful tactical air campaign in a directive which confirmed the RAF view of mission and target selection. The pattern of operations outlined by Churchill rejected the armyâ s preference to use the RAF for the close defence of its troops. Rather, Churchillâ s directive reflected the basic principles of Collishawâ s air plan employed during Operation Compass. This study is based on a close reading of Collishawâ s papers as well as the documentary records of the RAF, British Army and the British Cabinet. Operational Record Books, War Diaries and Cabinet minutes along with the personal letters and diaries of the main actors form the primary body of evidence for understanding the events in the Western Desert in 1940-1941

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed