National Aeronautics and Space Space Research (NASA) is difficult to reproach in a lack of love for symbolism. Employees of the department have repeatedly demonstrated the continuity of American inventors and engineers. For example, in July 1969, the Lunar Mission "Apollo-11" went small fragments of the original sheat and the Wooden Design "Flyer-1". Countryman Brothers Wright - Neil Armstrong - took these artifacts with him in a personal set of things and carried through all the flight stages, from the start from the ground before landing on the moon, and then returned to the museum.
The first apparatus for the controlled flight in the atmosphere of another celestial body is a drone helicopter ingenuity - also carries on board a piece of Flyer-1. According to ABC News, the specialists of the jet motion laboratory (JPL) were requested from the Carillon Historical Park Museum a fragment of the original plane of the plane of Right brothers. Historians provided a piece of unbleached Muslin size with a postage stamp taken from the left plane of the lower wing "Flyer-1". According to the NASA press release, it gently fastened with a tape, wrapped around the cable under the helicopter solar panel.
Guardian nephew and niece of legendary inventors, Stephen Wright (Stephen Wright) and Amanda Wright Lane, expressed their gratitude to NASA. According to them, Orville and Uliver would be incredibly glad, having learned that part of their creation will enter the history of the development of other planets. The symbolism of this level is difficult to submit: the detail of the device, which served as the starting point of all aircraft in modern form, will participate in a similar event, but already an interplanetary scale.
It is curious that Flyer-1 cover particles, flying into space, is hardly the only fragments of the original fabric "the pride of the West" used by the Rait brothers in their epocal design. A copy of the first flew aircraft, which was kept first in the London Museum of Science, and then in the Smithsonian Museum, had already been restored twice with the replacement of the entire sheat. Back in 1927, the original tissue was removed due to its wear, only a few relatively small fragments were preserved.
Flying to the moon and Mars - not all the adventures of the first details in the history of the flying aircraft. They flew twice on the "shuttle", and once it is very tragic. In January 1986, the same set, as Armstrong was the same, went to space on board "Challenger" in his last mission. As you know, less than a minute and a half after the start of the shuttle failed a catastrophe. Details "Flyer-1" later found among the wreckage and sent to the museum. Another flight of the artifacts of this aircraft took place in 1998: a piece of trim took John Glenn with him (John Glenn). By the way, as a result, Glenn turned out twice a pioneer: he was the first American, having flown in the earth in 1962, and the oldest man who visited space, "he has already been 77 years old at the time of the STS-95 mission.
Source: Naked Science