Famous Battleship Takes Final Voyage

The USS Iowa is a gun ship vessel which saw action during the World War II and the Korean War. It took its last voyage from San Francisco Bay to South Carolina last Saturday.

The USS Iowa was first commissioned in 1943. It once carried President Franklin Roosevelt to meet with Josef Stalin, and Chiang Kai-Shek. Apart from the World War II and Korean War, it also too part in the Persian War performing escort duties for the tankers.

The battleship carries 80 anti-aircraft guns and 40 anti-aircraft cannons. In 1984, its improvements include 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles and 16 Harpoon Anti-ship missiles.

On Saturday, USS Iowa passed under the Golden Gate Bridge surrounded by surrounded by pleasure boats and other vessels. Crowds gathered at both sides of the bridge to watch its final voyage.

The USS Iowa gun ship vessel will now stay at Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro where it will be under the care of Pacific Battleship Center. The center plans to make it into an interactive naval museum where guests can experience what it is life at sea feels like when you are on active duty.

Showcase Models manufactures scale models of gun ship vessels like the USS Iowa. Get them now!

News source: http://www.guardian.com.uk

NASA Building A New Unmanned Aircraft: X-56A MUTT

NASA’s Research Center, Dryden Flight, will soon have an unmanned aircraft named X-56A MUTT – short for Multi-Use Technology Testbed – it is being developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to start on testing technologies needed for new kinds of lightweight and flexible aircraft.

The newly-built aircraft is under contract to Lockheed Martin Corp., it is being made in California and will conduct the  flight experiments for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). X-56A MUTT is one of the Air Force’s newest designed X-planes. The 7.5 foot-long aircraft has a 28-foot wingspan and will be powered by two 52-pound thrust has JetCat P200 SX turbine engines.

Gary Martin, the Deputy Project Manager for NASA’s Subsonic Fixed Wing Project at Dryden Flight said to the press, “flexible wings and fuselages can result in significant reductions in the structural weight of aircraft. To maintain the long-term health of the structure and ride quality in a more flexible airplane, we need to actively alleviate gust loads on the airplane and suppress flutter, so gust load alleviation and active flutter suppression are two of the key technologies that NASA is working to advance.”

The MUTT is designed to address this problem by enabling engineers to practice suppressing flutter by adjusting software programs in the aircraft’s flight control computer. Researchers also expect to learn how better to ease gust loads, which will make flexible airplanes safer when they experience in-flight turbulence. The knowledge gained about flutter and gust suppression will be used in designing the proposed supersonic X-54, an aircraft that will demonstrate sonic boom-quieting technologies that could someday alleviate the noise concerns currently preventing supersonic commercial flight over land in the United States.

Dryden Research Center will oversee the flights for AFRL during summer 2012, and then take ownership of the X-56A MUTT for follow-on research after the Air Force tests are finished in early autumn.

To see more of the model space shuttles, you might want to check Showcase Models and discover the many gun ship vessels and civilian model planes there is.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov