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In 1985, as a stay at home mom, I felt I was very fortunate.  My daughter went to school at Country Dale Elementary School, in Franklin.  Apple computers were the rage in the Franklin schools.  I had never owned or used a computer before, but my daughter, who was in the Gifted and Talented Program (which, if I remember correctly had just been instituted in the school system) was very interested in computers.  With me being a volunteer at school, I was also interested, and I wanted a computer at home for both of us to use. 

We saved, and we purchased an computer.  I also bought the same programs that my daughter was using at school.  The cool thing was, the printer was dot matrix.  Wow!  The best thing, before we started using the internet for everything?  Having an encyclopedia program.  It was the greatest!

An Air Force investigation of the crash last fall of an F-15C Eagle fighter jet concluded that a defective metal beam in the frame cracked, causing it to disintegrate during flight.

In a report released last week, Air Force investigators said they had found the sole reason for the accident was the faulty support beam, called a longeron, which failed to meet the manufacturer's specifications.

Gen. John Corley, the top officer at Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va., called the situation a "crisis" that would be best solved by an infusion of costly new aircraft rather than fixing jets that are 25 years old.

The mechanical troubles, most acute in the F-15 Eagles used to protect the United States, also have led to a patchwork approach to filling critical air missions at home and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With nearly a third of the F-15 fleet grounded due to a defective support beam in the aircraft's frame, other fighter aircraft, including F-16s and new F-22s, are being shifted from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It's a rob Peter to pay Paul," Corley said at a Pentagon news conference. "It's unprecedented to have an air superiority fleet that's on average 25 years old."



Read the article from Military.com 
Air Force Fighter Fleet In Crisis  ÷here






Produced by Boeing Phantom Works as part of the US Air Force accident investigation, this animation reconstructs the in-flight structural failure of a US Air National Guard F-15C on November 2, 2007. The breakup was caused by fatigue cracking of a forward fuselage longeron. IMPORTANT - this is slowed down to one-fifth the actual speed of the event!

Forget e-mail....

How about space mail?

The experiment involving a 19-mile, super-strength tether hit a glitch, however, when the line failed to unwind fully, but Russian Mission Control said it hopes to salvage the test by recalculating the landing capsule's orbit.

"Even a fishing line could get stuck sometimes," Mission Control said spokesman Valery Lyndin.

The second Young Engineers Satellite, whose preparation involved nearly 500 university students from Europe, Japan, North America and Australia, was launched into orbit September 14 on a Russian-built Foton-M3 spacecraft, along with other European Space Agency experiments.

The goal of the YES2 experiment was to deliver Fotino -- a 12-pound reddish spherical capsule the size of a beach ball -- to Earth with the help of a long tether made of a substance the European Space Agency described as the world's strongest fiber.

In the experiment, the Fotino, held in a metal brace by straps, was to be shot out from the Foton-M3 spacecraft with springs as the tether gradually unwound, swinging the capsule forward into a lower orbit about 18 miles below.

About 2½ hours later, after gravity takes firm hold and the entire unit swings in a vertical position below the spacecraft, the Fotino is then released from its straps and glides through the atmosphere for about 20 minutes before a parachute deploys and the sphere bumps to a landing in the steppes of the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan.

The capsule has a thermal shield to protect it from the searing heat of re-entry through the Earth's atmosphere, while the tether and the holding clamps burn up.

The experiment went awry when only five miles of the tether were unwound from the spacecraft at about 190 miles above the Earth before the capsule was released.

The reason for the problem wasn't immediately clear, Lyndin said. "It could be that the tether got stuck," he added.

The Fotino is equipped with a radio beacon to allow experts to track it as it glides down through the atmosphere, and Mission Control will try to calculate its current orbit to determine when and where it will land, Lyndin said.

The Russian Space Agency sought to play down the problem, saying the experiment provided a "valuable information about the tether's dynamics in space flight."

"The results of the experiment could be considered partly successful," it said.

Roger Walker, the project manager for ESA's Education Office, also played down the glitch, saying on the agency's Web site that it was a "largely successful demonstration" and that the agency was proud of the students' work, even though full deployment was not reached.

The tether is .0196 inches thick and is made of Dyneema, which the ESA said is used by kite surfers.


Read an article from MSNBC.com 
One Small Step Toward Deliveries From Outer Space  ◄  here.