Fifty Years of American Space Exploration [Slideshow]

NASA celebrates half a century of American spaceflight with a new collection of space exploration images

FIRED UP FOR THE FUTURE | Slide 1 of 7

The laboratories managed by NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was replaced by NASA in 1958) were at the forefront of the development of reliable high-performance jet-propulsion engines. In this 1946 test, engineers at the Flight Propulsion Research Laboratory in Cleveland take motion pictures of exhaust gases being discharged from a burner used for studying thrust augmentation in jet engines. As is often the case in aerospace engineering studies, the camera is an essential tool for data analysis.

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