NASA’s funding for aeronautics research has been in significant decline since the 1990s, a trend that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, said he’d like to see reversed since the agency still has a lot of expertise in this area. “This doesn’t seem to be an issue of partisan politics, it’s just that it’s been in decline,” Griffin told reporters during a Jan. 13 meeting in Washington, D.C., that the Space Foundation sponsored. While some critics have referred to aeronautics as a “sunset industry,” Griffin doesn’t agree. Despite the funding declines, NASA still is playing a significant role in advancing the state of the art of efficient wing-body air vehicle designs, hypersonics, silent propulsions systems, and advanced air traffic management, he said. A great deal of collaboration is already taking place between the Air Force and NASA in the realm of hypersonic propulsion research, he noted.
The Pentagon has approved more military teams to deploy to mass COVID-19 vaccination centers as the push to vaccinate the public grows. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on March 4 approved 10 more teams to deploy to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency run the vaccination sites, bringing the…