From NASA

Legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield died today when his single-engine plane crashed in Georgia. He was 84.

Crossfield made aviation history on November 20, 1953, becoming the first person to fly at more than twice the speed of sound, or Mach 2.

Born in California in 1921, Crossfield went to the University of Washington and served in the Navy during World War II before joining NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — NACA, in 1950.
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Commentary

By Marc S. Posner
SOAR Magazine

When the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off for the first time 25 years ago today, it would have been nearly impossible to imagine the future — both bitter and sweet — of a program that has defined NASA for a generation. On April 12, 1981, John Young and Bob Crippen embarked on a two-day test mission to prove the shuttle’s flight worthiness.

This summer, despite 114 flights, the next shuttle crew will essentially be doing the same thing as the space agency attempts to recover from its second catastrophic failure of the Space Shuttle Program.

To be certain, the program’s accomplishments are both spectacular and far reaching.
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By NASA

After orbiting Earth more than 3,000 times during six months on the International Space Station, Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev returned to the planet Sunday morning in Kazakhstan. With them was Marcos Pontes, BrazilÂ’s first astronaut.

The Soyuz spacecraft with McArthur, Tokarev and Pontes landed in central Kazakhstan, about 30 miles northeast of Arkalyk, at 7:48 p.m. EDT Saturday. The crew’s families will greet them at Star City, Russia, near Moscow, early Monday. McArthur and Tokarev will remain in Star City for post-flight debriefings before returning to Houston later this month. McArthur and Tokarev launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Sept. 30, 2005.

They spent 189 days, 18 hours and 51 minutes in space. During their mission, they conducted two spacewalks and relocated their Soyuz spacecraft twice, becoming the first ISS crew to dock to every Russian docking port on the complex. They also became the first two-person station crew to conduct a spacewalk in both Russian and U.S. spacesuits. Pontes flew to the station with the Expedition 13 crew last week as part of a commercial agreement with the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos. He spent eight days on the station conducting experiments.
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