Do you remember family road trips of years gone by? A designated navigator would sit in the front passenger seat with a map and a highlighter, or with a AAA TripTik, telling the driver what turn to take next.
Bill Paxton portrays ill astronaut Fred Haise in Apollo 13. Photo: Photofest – H 2017
It’s Happened Before….
In the factual 1995 feature film Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, one of the other two Apollo 13 astronauts, Fred Haise played by Bill Paxton, gets quite ill during the flight back from the moon.
NASA’s X-59 aircraft was rolled out on January 12, 2024 at 4 PM EST as part of NASA’s Quesst mission. The X-59 is an experimental aircraft designed to reduce the sonic boom to a small thump. It’s hoped that the X-59 could fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound, or 925 miles per hour. Photo: NASA
It’s been a quarter of a century since commercial passengers could fly to American destinations at beyond the speed of sound. That was on the iconic Concorde, a joint French and English venture initiated in 1954 with first commercial flight in 1976.