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On 29 July 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which became operational on 1 October of that year. Over the next 50 years, NASA achieved a set of spectacular feats, ranging from advancing the well-established field of aeronautics to pioneering the new fields of Earth and space science and human spaceflight. In the midst of the geopolitical context of the Cold War, 12 Americans walked on the Moon, arriving in peace “for all mankind.” Humans saw their home planet from a new perspective, with unforgettable Apollo images of Earthrise and the “Blue Marble,” as well as the “pale blue dot” from the edge of the solar system. A flotilla of spacecraft has studied Earth, while other spacecraft have probed the depths of the solar system and the universe beyond. In the 1980s, the evolution of aeronautics gave us the first winged human spacecraft, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station stands as a symbol of human cooperation in space as well as a possible way station to the stars. With the Apollo fire and two Space Shuttle accidents, NASA has also seen the depths of tragedy. In this volume, a wide array of scholars turn a critical eye toward NASA’s first 50 years, probing an institution widely seen as the premier agency for exploration in the world, carrying on a long tradition of exploration by the United States and the human species in general. Fifty years after its founding, NASA finds itself at a crossroads that historical perspectives can only help to illuminate.
By the mid-1930s the obstacles to high speed that aircraft designers faced included the question of cooling the engine. This was a big challenge that those working on the new fast aeroplanes entering service as the war clouds gathered over Europe had to consider, as the drag from the system increased as a square of the speed. Ducted systems were designed which lowered drag, but these were based on the assumption that the system was cold. This ignored the potential energy from the air, heated by the radiator, for liquid-cooled aircraft, and from the discharged engine exhaust gases. It took a profoundly lateral thinker to harness the possibilities of the paradox that heat could cut the cost of cooling. That thinker was the British engineer Frederick William Meredith. A researcher at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough until 1938, F.W. Meredith a key player in the UK’s development of the autopilot and remote-controlled aircraft. His contribution to Allied success in the Second World War was enormous – but, incredibly, he was also a known a Soviet agent. Few would doubt that the Supermarine Spitfire was a pioneering aeroplane – not because it was an all metal, monoplane with retractable undercarriage and enclosed cockpit as these were not unique – but because it was the first to incorporate a Meredith designed ducted cooling system. This was intended from the beginning to use heat to create ‘negative drag’. In practice the Spitfire’s design was flawed, as Meredith himself pointed out, and did not fully use what became known as the ‘Meredith Effect’. Meredith also made entirely overlooked but extremely important contributions to resolving the problem of how to induce air smoothly into cooling ducts at high speeds without which, as the Spitfire demonstrated, ducted cooling systems worked sub-optimally. The first aeroplane properly to exploit the ‘Meredith Effect’ was the North American P-51 Mustang, this being a very significant factor as to why it was 30mph faster than the Spitfire when both had the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. This book by Peters Spring examines the life of the remarkable, and controversial, F.W. Meredith, an individual who has largely been forgotten by history despite the brilliant advances he made – advances which helped the Allies win the war against Hitler’s Third Reich.