Flight Paths: Purdue University's Aerospace Pioneers

Mastering any art or science requires quality training. Aviation is no different. In order to be successful, the best training was vital, and the more experience in training, the better. Purdue University was just such a place to acquire those skills. The university’s Civilian Pilot Training Program challenged its students to rise to achievements and make new discoveries, challenges that would not only benefit themselves, but also help create a better world.

Although historians have devoted considerable attention to Earhart’s 1937 disappearance, they have paid far less attention to her role as an intellectual and feminist, writer and communicator.

This Curatorial aims to take readers along with Neil Armstrong and David Scott on their historic Gemini VIII mission. Beginning from the arrival of the Gemini VIII spacecraft at Cape Canaveral, trace the path of this remarkable artifact and detail the Gemini VIII mission while highlighting the role played by the spacecraft’s heat-shield as it protected the astronauts during their emergency landing.

If the media coverage was any indication, the breakup and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003 was a major disaster, perhaps even a reason to question the relative benefits and costs of spaceflight. Were the risks to human life worth the gains? For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and associated teams involved in the recovery effort, the importance of the greater mission, space exploration, outweighed any particular risks.

The archives that bear his name reveal that Jerry Ross was a hard working student, was involved with many prestigious activates at Purdue, and regularly returned to his beloved Alma Mater. Purdue was a vital part of Ross’s life, equipping him with the skills and knowledge to become not only a record-holding, successful astronaut, but one of the best.

Even with all the achievements of her life, she was always a writer. Like so many aviators, she found inspiration in the sky.

The year was 1991, ten years after the first Mars expedition and the subsequent discovery of Emalium, an almost magical element that had become the lifeblood of human society on Earth.

The celebrity culture of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s was serious business.