Designers are considering a new re-entry vehicle with a metal skin. This would eliminate the tile system used on the space shuttle, which is expensive to maintain.

It's pretty tight quarters. If you are claustrophobic, this would not be the right job for you.

After four years of debugging, recent tests have shown that it does, indeed, run quietly at Mach 6. The wind tunnel airflow has about one-tenth to one-thirtieth of the noise in other high-speed wind tunnels.

We all tend to collect these things because it's a little bit of a nuisance to dispose of them.

Laminar airflows can have eight times less heating than turbulent ones.