A C-17 from Charleston AFB, S.C., airlifted NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft from Colorado to Florida. A NASA release says that Lockheed Martin workers in Denver had been assembling and testing the spacecraft for more than a year. NASA plans to launch Phoenix, which is designed to test a Martian Arctic plain to see whether it could have sustained microbacterial life, aboard a Delta II from Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., in August.
In 1941, Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold of the then-U.S. Army Air Corps, personally reviewed a jet engine patented by Sir Frank Whittle flying on a Gloster E.28/39 aircraft. Impressed by its design, Arnold arranged for a Whittle engine to be brought back to the U.S. and tasked General Electric…