SEATTLE — It may not be a real space shuttle, but it's ours.

Today NASA delivered a key piece of the mockup that astronauts used for space shuttle practice to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, my hometown. And it arrived aboard one of the most ungainly-looking airplanes ever built. The wingless mockup is known as the Full Fuselage Trainer, or FFT. The plane has a nickname that's more colorful: the Super Guppy.

The Super Guppy looks more like a Super Whale. The wide-body turboprop airplane has a cargo hold that's been built up into a bulbous shape, specifically to carry big stuff for outer space. Only five of the Guppies were ever produced, and they were used to cart spacecraft components around for the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and shuttle programs. This Super Guppy is the only one of its kind still flying, and this week's odyssey with the most important piece of the Full Fuselage Trainer is one of the highest-profile flights the plane has ever taken.

---

For decades, the plywood-built FFT sat in a building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew compartment — the part of the structure that was flown to Seattle today — was outfitted with all the buttons, switches, cockpit displays and middeck lockers that the real shuttles had. None of those gadgets worked, but they helped the astronauts get familiar with the layout before they started handling the real controls. Astronauts could also practice how they'd get out of the shuttle in the event of a landing-strip emergency.

With the end of the space shuttle era, NASA's Johnson Space Center no longer needed the FFT, so the space agency decided to donate it for display. The Seattle museum made a play for one of the flown shuttles, and even built a shuttle-sized, 15,500-square-foot Space Gallery to display it in. But Seattle lost out to Florida, California, New York and the "other Washington" in the competition for Atlantis, Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery. The Full Fuselage Trainer served as the consolation prize.

Most of the FFT's plywood parts could be shipped up by traditional means for later assembly, but the shuttle crew compartment had to be transported all in one piece. That's why NASA's Super Guppy was called into service.

The airplane has a 25-foot-high, 25-foot-wide, 111-foot-long cargo compartment — big enough to hold the mockup's most awkward piece, even when it's bound up in shrink wrap and a protective steel frame. Over the past couple of days, the Super Guppy has been making a journey from its home at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, over to California, and then up to Seattle at a top speed of around 200 knots. It wasn't exactly a record-setting pace — but what the Super Guppy lacks in speed, it more than makes up for in the "What the Heck Is That?" department.

The Guppy flew over my hometown and its surroundings with a Seattle-born astronaut, Greg Johnson, at the controls. Then it floated down to a landing right in front of the museum, which is adjacent to Boeing Field. One of the commentators at the museum called it a "beautifully ugly airplane."

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire pointed to the craft with pride as the sky spit down rain. "When we get together in Washington state, we can land the big whale right behind me," she said.

Several thousand onlookers watched as the Super Guppy's entire front opened up to the side like a four-story-high door. 

"It's really cool that it's actually able to fly," Allison Kirkman, a 10-year-old student at Spirit Ridge Elementary School in Bellevue, Wash., told me as she watched from the tarmac. "It's an amazing plane, and how they built it is cool, too."

The shrink-wrapped shuttle crew compartment was moved out of the wide-yawning Super Guppy onto a 65,000-pound mobile transporter, then rolled over to the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery. Over the next couple of months, the shuttle mockup will be assembled in a place of honor, alongside a Russian Soyuz capsule and a prototype lander that was used in Blue Origin's spacecraft development program. Museumgoers like Kirkman will be able to walk through the shuttle mockup's cargo bay — and they might even be able to crawl through the crew compartment, just like the astronauts did.

Kids, prepare to be amazed ... again.

---

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

An electromagnetic catapult successfully launched a fighter jet in a demonstration of two futuristic technologies, the U.S. Navy announced Monday.

The electromagnetic aircraft launch system, as the electromagnetic catapult is formally known, is being developed to replace the steam catapults that have launched fighter jets off Navy carriers for more than 50 years.

---

EMALS uses electric currents to generate magnetic fields that propel an aircraft down a launch track. 

 

The system, according to the Navy, is an improvement over of steam catapults, which are unable to generate the power needed to launch heavier and faster next generation fighter jets.  The catapult also causes less wear and tear on aircraft and is easier to maintain. 

In addition to the F-35C, which is a carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter scheduled for carrier trials in 2013, the EMALS team has launched a T-45 Goshawk, an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a C-2A Greyhound and several F/A-18 aircraft with and without stores over the past 12 months, the Navy reported.

EMALS will be deployed on the Navy's futuristic aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, which is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2015.

The F-35C and EMALS still face funding and technological hurdles in their development, notes the website DoD Buzz, but the successful launch Nov. 18 is did demonstrate the future of aviation.

Updated 9:00 am PT on 11/30 with more details on the test launch aircraft.

More on Navy technology:

• Navy twin stealth drone takes flight
• UFO-like drone hits cruise mode
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Two is better than one, especially when it comes to flight testing a stealth drone designed to take off and land from moving aircraft carriers at sea. The U.S. Navy announced today it has reached that milestone in its X-47B program.

The second tail-less unmanned aircraft — named Air Vehicle 2 — took to the skies from Edwards Air Force Base in California on Nov. 22 and flew a few racetrack patterns over Rogers Dry Lake at an altitude of 5,000 feet, said Northup Grumman, who is building the plane, in a news release.

---

The first flight of the original X-47B took place in February. That aircraft successfully retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration in September, allowing photographers to snap images that make the plane look like a UFO from a 1950s cartoon.

Having a second plane will allow for the collection of more performance data and keep the program on development schedule, the aerospace company said. 

The computer-controlled unmanned aircraft takes off and flies a pre-programmed mission and then returns to base in response to mouse clicks from a mission operator. The operator monitors the flight, but doesn't actively control it remotely, as for other drones.

One of the twin aircraft will transition to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., by the end of 2011, to begin testing of precision carrier approaches, arresting landings and "roll-out" catapult landings, according to the release. 

The tests will also include testing of recently installed guidance, navigation and control software that will enable the aircraft to land on a moving carrier deck, considered among the harshest aviation environments.

The second craft will remain in California to continue envelop expansion flights, which are used to demonstrate the aircraft performance under a range of range, speed, and fuel-load conditions. 

The first carrier launches are planned for 2013 and autonomous refueling demonstrations are slated for 2014. 

More on Navy technology:

• UFO-like drone hits cruise mode
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones

 

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

NASA says it has awarded the largest prize in aviation history, $1.35 million, to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for pushing the envelope on electric-powered flying.

To win the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, the Pennsylvania-based team's Taurus G4 electric airplane flew a 200-mile course from Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, Calif., in less than two hours. That's one of the requirements for the prize. Another is that the plane had to use less than the equivalent of a gallon of gas per person. The Pipistrel Taurus G4 exceeded that efficiency standard, flying the course on just a little more than a half-gallon of fuel equivalent per passenger.

What's even more amazing is that the runner-up did nearly as well. That earned a $120,000 second-place purse for California-based Team e-Genius and its electric-powered plane.

---

"Two years ago, the thought of flying 200 miles at 100 mph in an electric aircraft was pure science fiction," Jack W. Langelaan, team leader of Team Pipistrel-USA.com, said in today's award announcement. "Now we are all looking forward to the future of electric aviation."

Eric Raymond, e-Genius' team leader, was diplomatic in his remarks. "I'm proud that Pipistrel won," he said. "They've been a leader in getting these things into production, and the team really deserves it and worked hard to win this prize."

NASA's acting chief technologist, Joe Parrish, said the winner proved that "ultra-efficient aviation is within our grasp."

The challenge was one of several that NASA has backed over the past six years to encourage the development of technologies that could improve the way spaceflight and aeronautics is done. (Remember that the first "A" in NASA stands for aeronautics.) In a way, this particular prize goes full circle: NASA's Centennial Challenges were inspired by the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, which in turn was inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize for nonstop trans-Atlantic aviation.

Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize in 1927, and his grandson, Erik Lindbergh, was on hand at the Green Flight Challenge to pass along a prize of his own: the Lindbergh Prize for Quietest Aircraft. Team eGenius won that $10,000 award, which was donated by Jean Schulz, the widow of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.

NASA provides the purse for the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, with sponsorship support from Google and management by the CAFE Foundation (CAFE stands for Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency). Fourteen teams registered for the competition and collectively spent more than $4 million over the past two-plus years in pursuit of the purse. Most of the teams relied on electric engines, but the entries also included some planes powered by gasoline or biofuels.

Three planes made it to last week's finals: the Pipistrel and eGenius planes as well as a gasoline-powered plane fielded by the Florida-based Phoenix Air team. Among the factors that gave the Pipistrel Taurus G4 a boost were its dual-fuselage design, which allowed for a 75-foot wingspan with ultra-light construction, a super-efficient powertrain for its 6.5-foot-wide propeller and 450 pounds of lithium-polymer batteries. (EAA News delves into the details, and NASA has a Flickr photo gallery chronicling the competition.)

NASA hopes that the Green Flight Challenge will lead to even more ambitious aerial feats of fuel efficiency. Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier quotes Pipistrel's Langelaan as saying that his company is willing to contribute $100,000 toward a new prize for the first electric aircraft to break the speed of sound. How long would that take? Langelaan estimates five years.

Do you agree, or is that too much of a blue-sky prediction? Are electric aircraft blazing a trail for the future of aviation, or is this just a million-dollar sideshow? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More bright ideas on the tech frontier:

• NASA offers $5 milllion for new technological feats
• DARPA looks for ideas to clean up space debris
• Out-of-this-world ideas win NASA funding
• SpaceX sells its first ticket for a moon launch

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

A real-life jetpack passed a key test this month by soaring to a height of 5,000 feet, deploying an emergency parachute and drifting back down to New Zealand's Canterbury Plains.

"This successful test brings the future another step closer," Glenn Martin, the jetpack's inventor and founder of the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Co., said in a statement issued today.

Martin Aircraft says the previous altitude record for the fan-driven, wearable aircraft was 50 feet (15 meters). Sending a test pilot 100 times higher sounds like a scary proposition, and that's why the May 21 parachute test was unmanned. Instead, a dummy weighing as much as a human operator was put into the jetpack. The contraption was radio-controlled from a helicopter flying nearby.

---

The point of the exercise was to put the jetpack's emergency landing system to the test. The engine cut out at an altitude of 3,000 feet (900 meters), and then an off-the-shelf ballistic parachute popped out to slow the speed of descent. The jetpack hit the ground with a velocity of 15.7 mph (25.2 kilometers per hour), Martin Aircraft reported.

"The aircraft sustained some damage on impact, but we would expect that it is likely a pilot would have walked away from this emergency landing," the company said.

The jetpack pushed the envelope for climb rate (800 feet per minute or 4 meters per second, with the capability to rise even faster) and flight duration (9 minutes and 46 seconds). "This test also validated our flight model, proved thrust to weight ratio and proved our ability to fly a jetpack as an unmanned aerial vehicle, which will be key to some of the jetpack’s future emergency/search and rescue and military applications," Glenn Martin said.

The company expects the jetpack's first buyers to be military and emergency-response agencies — which might well be looking for ways to send in a remote-controlled aircraft capable of delivery, surveillance or extraction in situations that are too dangerous for more traditional conveyances.

Martin Aircraft's CEO, Richard Lauder, said the next steps in development will include improvements in the emergency parachute system, engine performance and high-speed flight stability.

The Martin jetpack project was unveiled almost three years ago at the EAA AirVenture air show in Wisconsin. The company says it's targeting an initial price tag of $100,000 for the recreational version of the vehicle. If the venture really does take off commercially, I could imagine jetpack rides becoming one of the offerings for recreational fliers, alongside hang-gliding adventures, ultralight airplane rides and balloon tours. Would you strap in? How much would you pay? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More on jetpacks and other dreams of flight:

• This jetpack can be yours for $100,000
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?
• Jetpack veterans meet new innovators
• Seven flights of fancy that fizzled

---

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.