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The Kee Bird was a United States Army Air Forces Boeing B-29 Superfortress, serial 45-21768, of the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron, that became marooned after making an emergency landing in northwest Greenland during a secret Cold War spying mission on 21 February 1947. While the entire crew was safely evacuated after spending three days in the isolated Arctic tundra, the aircraft itself was left at the landing site. It lay there undisturbed until 1994, when a privately funded mission was launched to repair and return it. During the attempted recovery, a fire broke out, resulting in the destruction and loss of the airframe on the ground.

A thermobaric weapon, aerosol bomb, or vacuum bomb is a type of explosive that uses oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion. In practice, the blast wave typically produced by such a weapon is of a significantly longer duration than that of a conventional condensed explosive. The fuel–air explosive is one of the best-known types of thermobaric weapon.

Most conventional explosives consist of a fuel–oxidizer premix (black powder, for example, contains 25% fuel and 75% oxidizer), but thermobaric weapons are almost 100% fuel and so are significantly more energetic than conventional condensed explosives of equal weight. Their reliance on atmospheric oxygen makes them unsuitable for use under water, at high altitude, and in adverse weather. They are, however, considerably more destructive when used against field fortifications such as foxholes, tunnels, bunkers, and caves, partly because of the sustained blast wave and partly by the consumption of the oxygen inside it.

Many types of thermobaric weapons can be fitted to hand-held launchers.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin  (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet Air Forces pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space, achieving a major milestone in the Space Race; his capsule Vostok 1 completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. Gagarin became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, his nation's highest honour.

Born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (a town later renamed after him), in his youth Gagarin was a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy. He later joined the Soviet Air Forces as a pilot and was stationed at the Luostari Air Base, near the Norwegian border, before his selection for the Soviet space programme with five other cosmonauts. Following his spaceflight, Gagarin became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre, which was later named after him. He was also elected as a deputy of the Soviet of the Union in 1962 and then to the Soviet of Nationalities, respectively the lower and upper chambers of the Supreme Soviet.

Vostok 1 was Gagarin's only spaceflight but he served as the backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal crash, killing his friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Fearing for his life, Soviet officials permanently banned Gagarin from further spaceflights. After completing training at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy on 17 February 1968, he was allowed to fly regular aircraft. Gagarin died five weeks later when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting with his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near the town of Kirzhach.

The Ryan Model 147 Lightning Bug is a jet-powered drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, produced and developed by Ryan Aeronautical from the earlier Ryan Firebee target drone series.

Beginning in 1962, the Model 147 was introduced as a reconnaissance RPV (Remotely Piloted Vehicle, nomenclature of that era) for a United States Air Force project named Fire Fly. Over the next decade — assisted with secret funding from the recently formed National Reconnaissance Office along with support of the Strategic Air Command and Ryan Aeronautical's own resources — the basic Model 147 design would be developed into a diverse series of variants configured for a wide array of mission-specific roles, with multiple new systems, sensors and payloads used, modified and improved upon during the operational deployment of these drones in Southeast Asia. Missions performed by the Model 147 series RPVs included high- and low-altitude photographic and electronic aerial reconnaissance, surveillance, decoy, electronic warfare, signals intelligence, and psychological warfare.

The Ryan drones were designed without landing gear for simplicity and to save weight. Like its Firebee predecessor, the Model 147 could either be air-launched from a larger carrier aircraft or launched from the ground using a solid rocket booster; at completion of its mission the drone deployed its own recovery parachute which could be snatched in mid-air by a recovery helicopter (in a combat environment it was naturally not desired to recover the drone on, from or near enemy territory and ground or water impact could also cause damage to or loss of the drone or its payload).

At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 the U.S. military's available funding and need for combat drones severely declined, even as Teledyne Ryan introduced further advanced developments of the Model 147 series such as the BGM-34 strike and defense suppression RPVs. Costs of maintaining the Lightning Bugs at full readiness could no longer be justified. Only by the 1990s did substantial interest, organization and funding again emerge from the U.S. Air Force and intelligence agencies to develop, acquire and widely deploy combat UAVs.

John Richard Boyd (January 23, 1927 – March 9, 1997) was a United States Air Force fighter pilot and Pentagon consultant during the second half of the 20th century. His theories have been highly influential in military, sports, business, and litigation strategies and planning.

As part of the Fighter Mafia, Boyd inspired the Lightweight Fighter program (LWF), which produced the successful General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, which are still in use by the United States and by several other military powers into the 21st century. Boyd, together with Thomas Christie, created the Energy–Maneuverability theory of aerial combat, which became the world standard for the design of fighter aircraft. He also developed the decision cycle known as the OODA loop, the process by which an entity reacts to an event.

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), originally referred to as the Manned Orbital Laboratory, was a never-flown part of the United States Air Force's human spaceflight program, a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane project. The project was developed from several early Air Force and NASA concepts of crewed space stations to be used for reconnaissance purposes. MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, with which crews would be launched on 40-day missions and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft, derived from NASA's Project Gemini.

The MOL program was announced to the public on 10 December 1963 as an inhabited platform to prove the utility of putting people in space for military missions. Astronauts selected for the program were later told of the reconnaissance mission for the program. The contractor for the MOL was the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Gemini B was externally similar to NASA's Gemini spacecraft, although it underwent several modifications, including the addition of a circular hatch through the heat shield, which allowed passage between the spacecraft and the laboratory.

MOL was canceled in 1969, during the height of the Apollo program, when it was shown that uncrewed reconnaissance satellites could achieve the same objectives much more cost-effectively. U.S. space station development was instead pursued with the civilian NASA Skylab (Apollo Applications Program) which flew in the mid-1970s.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched three Almaz military space stations, similar in intent to the MOL, but cancelled the program in 1977 for the same reasons.

There is a MOL space suit on display at the Oklahoma City Science Museum, presumably never used.

Speed tape is an aluminium pressure-sensitive tape used to perform minor repairs on aircraft and racing cars. It is used as a temporary repair material until a more permanent repair can be carried out. It has an appearance similar to duct tape, for which it is sometimes mistaken, but its adhesive is capable of sticking on an airplane fuselage or wing at high speeds, hence the name.

The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash was an accident that occurred near Goldsboro, North Carolina, on 23 January 1961. A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress carrying two 3–4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air, dropping its nuclear payload in the process. The pilot in command, Walter Scott Tulloch, ordered the crew to eject at 9,000 feet (2,700 m). Five crewmen successfully ejected or bailed out of the aircraft and landed safely, another ejected, but did not survive the landing, and two died in the crash. Information declassified in 2013 showed that one of the bombs came very close to detonating.

On 4 July 1989, a pilotless MiG-23 jet fighter of the Soviet Air Forces crashed into a house in Kortrijk, Belgium, killing one person. The pilot had ejected over an hour earlier near Kołobrzeg, Poland, after experiencing technical problems, but the aircraft continued flying for around 900 km (600 mi) before running out of fuel and descending into the ground.

Jane's Information Group, now styled Janes, is a global open-source intelligence company specialising in military, national security, aerospace and transport topics, whose name derives from British author Fred T. Jane.