re space research spin off on tue apr gmt pgf srl cacs usl edu phil g fraering said phil shafer rigel dfrf nasa gov mary shafer writes on apr prb access digex com pat said pat in article apr aurora alaska edu pat nsmca aurora alaska edu writes question is can someone give me examples of direct nasa space related research that helped humanity in general it will be interesting to see pat tang mylar i think i think they also pushed hi tech pat composites for airframes look at fly by wire swept wings if you fly in airliners you ve reaped the benefits phil didn t one of the early jet fighters have these i also think phil the germans did some work on these in wwii the naca came up with them before world war ii nasa is directly descended from the naca with space added in you ll notice that i didn t mention sweep wings even though the x tested at what s now dryden had them we did steal that one dirctly from the germans the difference is that swept wings don t change their angle of sweep sweep wings do perhaps the similarity of names has caused some confusion s have swept wings f s have sweep wings winglets area ruling digital fly by wire ride smoothing phil a lot of this was also done by the military after nasa aerodynamicists proposed them and nasa test teams demonstrated them richard whitcomb and r t jones at langley research center were giants in the field dryden was involved in the flight testing of winglets and area ruling in the s and s respectively it s true that we used military aircraft as the testbeds kc and yf but that had more to do with availability and need than with military involvement the yf was completely ours and the kc was bailed to us the air force of course was interested in our results and supportive of our efforts dryden flew the first digital fly by wire aircraft in the s no mechnaical or analog backup to show you how confident we were general dynamics decided to make the f flyby wire when they saw how successful we were mind you the avro arrow and the x were both fly by wire aircraft much earlier but analog phil egad i m disagreeing with mary shafer the nasa habit of acquiring second hand military aircraft and using them for testbeds can make things kind of confusing on the other hand all those second hand navy planes give our test pilots a chance to fold the wings something most pilots at edwards air force base can t do mary shafer dod kotfr nasa dryden flight research facility edwards ca shafer rigel dfrf nasa gov of course i don t speak for nasa a mig at your six is better than no mig at all unknown us fighter pilot
