As NASA’s Space Shuttle winds down towards its final flight — PAT NORRIS reports from Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on the countdown to its retirement and successor space access systems.

This is a full article published in Aerospace International: October 2010. As a member, you recieve two new Royal Aeronautical Society publications each month - find out more about membership.

Aerospace International talks to the Rt Hon Gerald Howarth, MP for Aldershot, Minister for International Security Strategy at the Ministry of Defence and a private pilot, about this year’s Farnborough Airshow, encouraging young people into the industry and why UK aerospace and defence exports will lead the way out of the deficit.

RICHARD GARDNER visits Rolls-Royce at Derby to see progress on the new Trent XWB powerplant for the Airbus A350.

With an intake diameter wider than the fuselage of Concorde, the new Rolls-Royce Trent XWB which has begun ground testing at the company’s main UK commercial engine facility, is a very impressive powerplant, from every angle, and looks set to become one of the biggest civil engine programmes over the next three to four decades. For Rolls-Royce, this is perhaps the single most significant member of the Trent family and is taking engine production technology to a new high within a truly global partnership.

The UK is leading the world in a game-changing new manufacturing technique that has the potential to usher in a new industrial revolution, with aerospace and other hi-tech sectors blazing the way. TIM ROBINSON reports from EADS Innovation Works in Filton, Bristol.

(first published in UAV special edition of Aerospace International, September 2009 - one of two nominations for Aerospace Journalist of the year awards 2010)

Now that portable and hand-launched UAVs have become established as valuable military assets, work is underway to develop smaller and smaller designs. BILL READ reports on the technological challenges faced in the incredible  shrinking world of MAVs and NAVs.

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.

Aerospace International talks to the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic Airways, STEVE RIDGWAY, CBE, about volcanic ash, the rise of airline alliances and his carrier’s green mission.

AI: How has the volcanic ash affected your business? How much do you expect you might have lost?

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.

The UK Government has announced a series of defence cuts in advance of a wider Strategic Defence Review. MIKE BRATBY from the RAeS Air Power Group asks if this combination of cost-cutting before planning for the future is reshaping Britain’s defence in an uneasy mix that does not add up to a strategy.

The Editor, Richard Gardner, interviews Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, KCB, ADC, BSc, FRAeS, CCMI, RAF, Chief of the Air Staff.

As the Royal Air Force enters its 92nd year as one of the best equipped and most operationally active air arms in the world, it is facing a future that is far from clear. By the end of the year it is expected that a new, and long overdue, Strategic Defence Review should provide a re-adjustment in policy to reflect changing circumstances but nobody is expecting defence funding, as a proportion of GDP, to be restored to the higher level that was in place when the last SDR set out its priorities.

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. 

After false starts — Boeing’s flight test campaign for the 787 is now underway, ahead of the first delivery of the Dreamliner later this year. TIM ROBINSON profiles the testing activity for the 787 and speaks to Randy Tinseth, vice president marketing, Boeing Commerical Airplanes, on the programme’s future.

On 15 December 2009 on a cold and misty Seattle morning, the prototype Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the first all new airliner of the 21st century made its maiden flight, watched by Boeing employees, the world’s media and also by thousands around the globe logged in online through the Internet. The three-hour flight from the 787 factory at Everett’s Paine Field saw the two pilots, chief test pilot Mike Carriker and engineering test pilot Randy Neville thread ZA001 round foggy weather to finally land at the flight test centre at Boeing Field. With the visibility closing in and a requirement for safety reasons to take off to the north, (where it is more sparsely populated) it had been touch and go on the day but, luckily, a weather window appeared and history was made.

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.

On the eve of the 2010 Singapore Air Show, RICHARD GARDNER looks at evolving air power in the Asia-Pacific defence market.

Defence and aerospace leaders from all over the Asia-Pacific region will be heading towards the Changi exhibition site in February to see what is of interest in one of the world’s most dynamic defence markets. For the global giants, especially those based in Europe, suffering from a general downturn in home defence business, this region represents a highly valuable export outlet which can play a key role in extending production flows through the recession period.

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.