By ©2025 Sarah Becker
What is it about the change of seasons, from spring to summer that keeps me looking upward to the sky? It is the change in the sky’s blue hues, the deeper blue color. Maybe that’s why—on April 14, 2025—Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin sent an all-female seven person crew into space to observe Earth’s atmosphere. NASA studies the mixed gaseous mass in order to better understand Earth’s chemistry, air quality, weather patterns, and climate change.
Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel in space—on June 16, 1963. Tereshkova made 48 earth orbits in 70 hours. America’s first female astronaut—Sally K. Ride—departed on June 18, 1983, aboard NASA’s Challenger space shuttle. All are remembered for their springtime adventures.
In 1901 American scientist, astronomer, and mathematician Simon Newcomb [1835-1909] “predicted that man would never fly.” Said Newcomb in 1903:
“The desire to fly like a bird is inborn in our race, and we can no more expect to abandon the idea than the ancient mathematician could have been expected to give up the problem of squaring the circle. The example of the bird does not prove that man [or woman] can fly.”
Also in 1903: the Wright brothers, Orville [1871-1948] and Wilbur [1867-1912] made four successful test flights in a gasoline-powered heavier-than-air machine over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their flights marked the beginning of aerial navigation.
To dream: to imagine; think of as a possibility; to invent. The principles of atmospheric flight [the physics and chemistry of Earth’s lower and middle atmospheres] are a lesson not only in physics, but also technology and history. When I think of the physics of history I think of my niece B., textbooks in hand.
Until the airplane, hot air balloons provided the only means of human flight. Joseph Michel and Jacques Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon in 1783. The Archimedes’ principle is the secret to the balloon’s lift-carrying power.
Said General George Washington in 1784: “I have only newspaper Accts of the Air Balloons, to which I do not know what credence to give; as the tales related of them are marvelous, & lead us to expect that our friends at Paris, in a little time, will come flying thro’ the air…to get to America.”
“The Wright brothers’ interest in planes began in childhood when their father brought home a toy with a propeller wound up by rubber bands and wings of bamboo and tissue paper,” The Washington Post explained. “It fascinated the boys, who were of mechanical and inventive minds, and they experimented in building others.”
The mechanically inclined brothers opened Ohio’s Wright Cycle Exchange in 1892. They tested their first full-size glider in September 1900.
The 1903 Wright Flyer 1 was constructed in the rear of the shop; then shipped, in sections, to North Carolina for trial. Wilbur Wright felt flight would fail until such time as man could sustain wings; install a motor and properly control the bird in flight. He was the first inventor to equate control inputs—pitch, roll and yaw—with motion.
Wing warping was Wilbur’s solution to airplane control. Twisting the wing surface, he decided, changed the wing’s position relative to oncoming wind. Such changes in position enabled directional changes. Wright tested his theory by twisting an empty bicycle tube box with the ends removed.
The Wright brothers perfected their flying machine in 1905, but did not begin public demonstrations until a patent was issued in 1908. The U.S. Army agreed to purchase the Wrights’ flying machine for $25,000 provided it could carry two men and enough fuel to complete a 40 miles per hour, 125-mile flight. Military test flights began in June 1909 at Arlington’s—then the County of Alexandria’s Fort Myer.
“Orville Wright late yesterday encircled the Fort Myer drill grounds in his aeroplane in three successful flights,” the July 2, 1909, Alexandria Gazette observed. “In his last attempt he remained aloft for a few seconds more than nine minutes.” Twenty-six days later Wright established a new flight-duration record of one hour, one minute and 40 seconds.
The nation’s first speed trial, also its first cross country flight, occurred on July 30, 1909. Orville Wright successfully flew his machine ten-miles from Fort Myer to Alexandria’s Shooter’s Hill. The average flight speed was 42-miles per hour, more than the Army’s contractual minimum of 40-miles per hour.
“The truth of the saying, ‘All things come to those who wait,’ was made apparent to Alexandrians at sunset yesterday when [Wright’s] biplane made an aerial run from the parade grounds at Fort Myer as far as the Southern and Washington Railway tracks south of the reservoir of the Alexandria Water Company,” the July 31, 1909 Alexandria Gazette confirmed. “The engine worked perfectly. The greatest height reached was probably 400 feet above the gully at Four Mile Run.”
Orville and Wilbur Wright showed courage and daring when introducing their heavier-than-air machine. The brothers not only gave us flight, they gave us hope. The kind of hope found only in dreams.
The Wright brothers remained involved with flight until Wilbur’s untimely death in 1912, at age 45. Their many achievements were commemorated in 1932 with the placement of a 60-feet granite statue on North Carolina’s Kill Devil Hill.
“On December 17, 1948, the Smithsonian Institution unveiled the 1903 Wright Flyer 1 at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building,” The Washington Post confirmed. “The placard displayed with the plane read: ‘The world’s first power-driven, heavier-than-air machine in which man made free-controlled and sustained flight, invented and built by Wilbur and Orville Wright.” It is noted as “the brightest gem in the Smithsonian’s collection of aircraft.”
Astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to attempt a suborbital flight into space, successfully piloted NASA’s Freedom 7 spacecraft on May 5, 1961. “Think of our world as it looks from the rocket that is heading to Mars,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said four years later. “It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps.”
NASA astronauts first boarded the International Space Station [ISS] in 1998. “The ISS is the only object whose components were manufactured by different countries and assembled in space,” former NASA-ISS astronaut Scott Kelly wrote.
“Looking down at the planet from 200 miles in space, I feel as though I know the Earth in an intimate way most people don’t—the coastlines, terrains, mountains, and rivers,” Kelly continued. “Some parts of the world, especially in Asia, are so blanketed by air pollution that they appear sick, in need of treatment or at least a chance to heal…[The] fragility seems to demand our protection.”
On May 1, 2025, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers emerged from the ISS “to perform the 5th all-female spacewalk.” Unlike the Earth’s blue sky, the sky surrounding the ISS is black. Why is the ISS sky black?
Different from Earth’s Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, there is almost no atmosphere to scatter light in space. That said spacewalking astronauts, female and or male can still see Earth’s distant blue sky. They should see a blue-ish rim around the Earth’s horizon during sunrise and sunset.
About the Author: Sarah Becker started writing for The Economist while a graduate student in England. Similar publications followed. She joined the Crier in 1996 while serving on the Alexandria Convention and Visitors Association Board. Her interest in antiquities began as a World Bank hire, with Indonesia’s need to generate hard currency. Balinese history, i.e. tourism provided the means. The New York Times describes Becker’s book, Off Your Duffs & Up the Assets, as “a blueprint for thousands of nonprofit managers.” A former museum director, SLAM’s saving grace Sarah received Alexandria’s Salute to Women Award in 2007. Email: abitofhistory53@gmail.com