The first privately built and piloted vehicle to reach space has been donated to the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum. The official turnover of SpaceShipOne takes place Oct. 5. NASM plans to hang it in the museum’s Milestones gallery, next to Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 and Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis.”
With the Air Force in the midst of its biggest testing boom in decades, the Maintenance Operational Test (MxOT) Division at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., is making sure those tests include an often-overlooked perspective: that of maintainers.