And Phil McAlister, acting director of commercial space flight development at Nasa, added: "I want to emphasise this is a test flight.
A number of major milestones have been accomplished to date, including the construction of major elements of flight hardware, the development of operations and sustaining engineering centers, astronaut training, and eight Space Shuttle/Mir docking missions.
In addition to his exploration of the fossil record and encounters with enthusiastic scholars in the field — notably the wunderkind paleontologist Xing Xu, who has named more than 30 new dinosaur species — he details various theories of feather evolution and the development of flight.
The series, which will take 12 months to produce, will chart the development of flight from its beginnings in insects, through the evolution of birds and ending with bats.
The find is significant because it is unusual to see such membrane development in a dinosaur and further complicates study into the development of flight.
This paper gives an overview of the experiment and a discussion of the flight hardware development and its status.
NASA's plans for development of flight hardware to support research on the International Space Station over the next decades will also be discussed including the planned development of a cryogenic facility for providing an environment below 2 Kelvin for up to 6 months to future investigators.
Since these findings reveal remarkable parallels to other tissue stem cell systems in Drosophila, we consider the disc-associated AMPs to be a novel type of muscle stem cell that orchestrates the early phases of adult flight muscle development in Drosophila.
In a statement, the Smithsonian said, "The National Air and Space Museum tells the story of the development of flight and chronicles the history of the technologies that have made flight possible".
His teenage son, Terry, was helping him study the development of flight in chukar chicks.
