Exclusive interview with Dr Reinhard Opitz - German WW2 veteran and one of the few pilots to have flown the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163 fighter.

This is an article published in The Aerospace Professional: July 2010

This year’s Farnborough Air Show will provide a whole range of exciting activities for young people.

Last November, 45 year 3-4 students from Turner Primary School in Canberra visited the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW@ADFA) to take part in the inaugural Cool Aeronautics educational day organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society Canberra Branch and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Sydney Section.

This is an excerpt from an article published in The Aerospace Professional: May 2010.

The Ballantyne Seminar 2010 took place on 26 March under the title ‘Flying out of a Recession’ and its main theme was the effects of the financial climate on aerospace engineering and business. It was aimed at young people from 14 to 18 years old, to reflect on the ways that the aerospace industry has responded to the recession and what the future may hold for young people wanting to start a career. The Ballantyne Seminar was kindly sponsored by Boeing.

British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers has arranged for the President’s travelling medal of office to accompany him into space during STS-132 currently scheduled to launch on 14 May for a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. This will be Space Shuttle Atlantis’s final flight. 

Regina Peldszus,
doctoral researcher in spacecraft habitability, Kingston University, London

Out of this World: The New Field of Space Architecture — this is the title of the discipline’s seminal book, published last autumn by the AIAA and its technical committee on space architecture. The dialogue of aerospace and architecture/ industrial design is beginning to flourish, and concepts and ventures are increasingly making news in both design and aerospace media. Not so new a field, however: Especially in the US and Russia, architects have been involved in space programmes from the beginning. To ‘humanise’ Skylab, NASA enlisted the office of industrial designer Raymund Loewy, while on the Soviet side, architect Galina Balashova had already been working on interior programming for space station concepts.

A submission from the Royal Aeronautical Society

Summary
It is axiomatic that the UK needs broad and effective access to the world air transport system; this is a necessary function of maintaining a competitive national economy as well as encouraging economic growth in the British regions.