Description: The passage mentions something about usaf-portal, shown by Theodore Von Karman. The Air Force is ready to listen to your ideas on how we continue our technological advantage and meet the national security challenges of 2030 and beyond.
The importance of basic scientific research was impressed on Theodore Von Karman when Orville Ride informed him that he and his brother had started from the ground up and relied on their own painstaking scientific research on developing the Wright Flyer.
Until then Von Karman assumed the brothers were gifted tinkers who stumbled upon the principles of flight airforce. Basic scientific research reaches all the way back to 1917 and the founding of what would become the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Basic research programs led to technology. That continues to shape the United States Air Force’s mission in all three of its domains air, space and cyberspace. The explains not only yielded the first supersonic flight but also research data on swing wings, highly maneuverable air foils, vertical takeoff and landing and other groundbreaking technology.
These test programs supplied a voluminous data to the Air Force that proved invaluable to US military aircraft designs throughout the rest of the century. AFRL basic research programs involving rocket engines, lifting bodies, re-entry vehicles, materials, electronics, optics and sensors have enabled the United States Air Force to maintain its domination of the space domain.
In the early 1960s the Air Force Office of Scientific Research funded the first military study of human machine interface. This basic research led to the development of the computer mouse. The graphical user interface and much of its technology were involved in the development of ARPANET the precursor to the internet.
Airplanes like the f-22, the fifth-generation Tactical Fighter, were hardly a glimmer in the eye of the designers of the supersonic x1. However the f-22s design stands on research reaching back directly to the start of the x-plane program. The Delta 4 launch vehicle can lift a 65,000 pound payload into low-earth orbit.
The research that led to its development started in 1944 with a liquid-fueled sounding rocket carrying a 25 pound payload 20 miles high. Today’s silicon marvels of computational power are the descendants of technology developed by and for the United States Air Force.
Today’s research is tomorrow’s Airforce technology. The United States Air Force is seeking the next great research idea that will yield the next great Air Force capability to help the Air Force invent the future.