Technology   

This continuation of personal experiences from the instructor's participation in military, agricultural, and aerial firefighting aviation will include stories from the early days of flight to modern adventures of the 21st Century. You'll learn about airplanes and the characters who flew them, from Orville Wright to Burt Rutan (1903-2025).

This class includes short presentations (talks, slides, videos) followed by discussions on all sorts of current US and world topics involving history, government, policy, science, technology, literature, education, culture, and many more. Participants are welcome to make presentations, suggest topics, discuss, or just listen. Special guests are also welcome to present.

Space junk, in the past consisting primarily of old, defunct satellites and booster rockets, is becoming increasingly dominated by small spacecraft inserted into low orbit by Elon Musk's Starlink. Each launch inserts about 40 or more individual satellites into orbit, but now, one or two of these units is deorbiting every day! While they present minimal safety hazard to us, they are cluttering the low-orbit region above us and could make this region unusable (astronomers do not like them at all). We will investigate this growing problem.